Project Mailer - User contributions [en]

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-20T13:11:21Z

Priley1984: /* Completed the remediation assignment */

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]
:{{Reply to|Flowersbloom}} great, thank you. I made some corrections. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox
:{{Reply to|ASpeed}} great. Let me know when it’s finished and posted, and I’l have a look. It appears as if you still have a bit of work to do. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} this one is good. I made some corrections before removing the banner, mostly in your sources. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} looking very good, but some sources missing page numbers. Please see to those. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

:::Thank you @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] . I will review those and respond when complete. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 22:47, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. Thank you for your feedback. A review of article additions was made for source pages. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 20:22, 11 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{Reply to| ALedezma}} ok, looking good. I made some corrections. There's one final thing to do: no footnotes should appear in the notes section; use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead; I did one to show you how to use the template. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] Changes were done to footnote sources. Thank you! [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 19:59, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TWietstruk}} good work so far, but there is more to do: placement of footnotes (eliminate spaces around them and punctuation always goes ''before'' the footnote.); proofread for typos; fix all red errors at the bottom (most of these are from errors in sourcing); works cited entries should be bulleted list and eliminate space between entries. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Final edit and no errors with some help from @NRMMGA5108, @JKilchenmann. Please mark me as complete. On to help someone else with the things I've learned
https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 17:52, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.
:{{Reply to|ADear}} thank you. I have marked this as complete. Please be sure you sign your talk page posts correctly. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

::::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I see that I still have a red X for my remediation assignment. Is there something else I am still missing? —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{reply to| CVinson}} sorry, I'm just getting back to it. There are quite a few punctuation errors. Some left out and others appear after the {{tl|sfn}}. I'm trying to correct those I see, but you should have a look, too. Page is designated as <code>p=</code> in {{tl|sfn}}, not <code>pg=</code>; and a span of pages needs <code>pp=</code>. Again, I have tried to correct these. I removed the banner, but please have another look through. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:01, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} all parenthetical citations must be remediated to {{tl|sfn}}; none of yours are. Get these done, then we can worry about the errors. (Some notes on sources: any generic <code><nowiki>{{citation}}</nowiki></code> will not be correct. I see you have a book review by Marshall that has no source (I tried to find the original and cannot; this is a weird citation; I'll continue to look for it). There's also one that looks like a film that should use the [[w:Template:Cite AV media|<code>Cite AV media</code> template]].) Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:16, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}}I believe I have completed these fixes, so the article is again ready for review. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 15:49, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to| Sherrilledwards}} truly exceptional work—a model remediation! Marked as complete. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:30, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I found the page number error and its corrected, and yes all the parenthetical citations should be referencing issues of the ''playboy'' magazine, which were not listed in the works cited. --[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| NrmMGA5108}} it looks great. I removed the banner! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:29, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the short footnotes.

I have gone line by line with a ruler to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} much better. Periods go inside quotations marks; I think I fixed these, but please check. Also, there are no spaces before footnotes; again, I did a find/replace, but you should check. Also, check that all titles of novels are italicized (if it's italicized in the PDF, then it has to be italicized in the remediation, including abbreviations, like ''Naked''); I fixed a couple. Also, no extra spaces; there should only be a single blank space between paragraphs. There are quite a few little details that needed (need?) fixing. I removed the banner, but please check my work. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 12:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
@Grlucs, per your suggestions, I've made the corrections. Please review. I look forward to your feedback. Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} looking better. All parenthetical page numbers should be removed and added to the {{tl|sfn}}. Check your page numbers in {{tl|pg}}. Footnotes should have no spaces around them; periods and commas go ''inside'' quotation marks and before the footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:28, 19 April 2025 (EDT)

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
:{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Thank you. I will get started on these revisions immediately. Thanks for the feedback and your time. :)[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 11:30, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} I have completed all the requested revisions and ready for review round 2. Thank you again![[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 12:10, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} looking better! There are still items to be seen to, like titles on novels and magazines need to appear like they do in the original: if it's italicized in the PDF, it must be italicized on the web. I added the epigram for you and corrected that pesky citation. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}}I have completed edits. I went through and took out quotes around The Time Machine, except for one instance that the author uses them. All my other titles seem to correspond to the original article. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you for the epigram and the pesky citation correction. Best, [[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 15:25, 17 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} received, and good work. I had to clean up the sources a bit, so you might want to have a look. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:42, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}}I went back and reviewed some of the other articles marked complete to compare and look for remaining revisions. I made one change on Works Cited and also added the page numbers to correspond to the pdf. Let's try this again. Again, I *believe I am finished with this article. Best,[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 10:36, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

Hopefully this works!. I'm not sure how to reply to other threads, but I was scrolling through the PDF and noticed the publisher is Iowa Pres? Just curious if it's supposed to be Iowa Press? [[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 22:33, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Wverna}} I'm not sure what you're talking about. Perhaps if you included a link to the article? See [[w:Help:Talk pages|Talk page guidelines]] if you don't know how to use them. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:33, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
Just kidding, I responded to the wrong "Bell Tolls' article. I was referring to this one: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tolls_of_War:_Mailerian_Sub-Texts_in_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls sorry about that! [[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 17:49, 19 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation articles: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

&

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Effects_of_Trauma_on_the_Narrative_Structures_of_Across_the_River_and_Into_the_Trees_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley
:{{Reply to|Priley1984}} thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:40, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna
:{{Reply to|Wverna}} received, thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:51, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010
:{{Reply to| Essence903m}} thank you. I had to fix and clean-up quite a bit. Your saves also do not include summaries. When you move on to your next article, please be more careful and follow the instructions. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} thank you, and this is a good start, but there are still many items that need to be cleaned up, like footnote indications (They go after punctuation), citation errors (all the red errors at the bottom need to be seen to), extra spaces and ALL CAPS need to be removed. Please see other completed articles for models. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:18, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/What Would Be the Fun of That?|"What Would Be the Fun of That?"]] by Peter Alson.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:33, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} awesome! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:21, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “Remembering Norris Church” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris Church|“Remembering Norris Church”]] by John Bowers.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 16:17, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} and again, excellent! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:22, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “The Norris I Knew” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/The Norris I Knew|“The Norris I Knew”]] by Christopher Busa.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:04, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} rockin’! 👍🏼 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Norris Mailer" Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Norris Mailer|"Norris Mailer"]] by Nancy Collins.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} thanks again. You’re tearing it up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:32, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Rise Above It" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Rise Above It|"Rise Above It"]] by David Ebershoff—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 11:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} excellent. Many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:15, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Additional Articles ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have remediated [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/A_View_Through_the_Prism&oldid=18744|"A View Through the Prism"], [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/Lip_Liner|"Lip Liner"], and [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Living_Room_Show#|"The Living Room Show"] in Volume 5. They are ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 12:31, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ADavis}} great work. Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:26, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Submission notification sent 29 March ==

@grlucas

Dr. Lucas - I sent a Talk Page notification that I had completed the page I remediated on 29 March. The table indicates I haven't done anything yet. I sent it from the Talk Page from the article site. I don't see a response from that notification, but I had received one from you earlier in the process.
I don't understand what happened.

[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|LogansPop22}} sorry if I missed that. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works|this article]], right? It's looking great, though all the parenthetical citations must be converted to footnotes using {{tl|sfn}} and some of the author names in your notes should use {{tl|harvtxt}}. I added the "citations" section for you. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law ==

@Grlucas, I have made some additional edits to this [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law article] in Volume 5 by correcting most of the citations. There are 2 that still do not work, but I think that is because the sources are incomplete.

[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 21:16, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TPoole}} Looking really good, and this is a complicated one. A couple of things: no spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}; I removed the spaces before {{tl|sfn}}, but you might want to check them; there are some typos, like missing spaces before some parentheses; no footnotes should appear in the notes section: use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead. And all the red errors at the bottom need to be cleared up. Great work so far! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:00, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Red Error-Gone ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}I have deleted all the sfn's and the red error is gone. I don't know why I didn't think about this days ago.

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe|Gladstein-Monroe]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 23:07, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} getting closer. A few things: you should use <code>|author-mask=1</code> for repeated author names in your works cited; all parenthetical citations need to be replaced with footnotes using {{tl|sfn}}; must punctuation in your sources need to be removed as the templates do that for you; and you need to use {{tl|harvtxt}} for citations in your endnotes. Also, letters and films have their own templates. I did a couple of these for you as examples. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:14, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Remembering Norris" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris|"Remembering Norris"]] by Margo Howard.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:20, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_From_Orgone_Accumulator_to_Cancer_Protection_for_Schizophrenics

I was unable to find the correct format for the first works cited entry under Mailer. It is a reprint of a magazine article. Thank you. [[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 16:28, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} you are a master remediator! Thank you for going above and beyond. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:44, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

==Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Trust & Sparring with Norman==
Dr. Lucas, these were some of the smaller ones, so I went ahead and knocked them out. They are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Sparring with Norman|Sparring with Norman]], [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Trust|Trust]], and [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls|Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 10:27, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Kamyers}} all excellent—above and beyond! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing'' ==

Hi everyone,
I am currently helping with the article, [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Death,_Art,_and_the_Disturbing:_Hemingway_and_Mailer_and_the_Art_of_Writing Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing]. It still has a good bit to go, if anyone wants to help out.
—[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 5:17 PM, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} thanks! I added the author info. I'm not sure many will see your request; you might want to post it on the forum. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:56, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Thank you for adding the author information and I have posted the request in the forum. Thank you! —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:CVinson|talk]]) 6:53 PM, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Mimi and Mercer ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have corrected the Mimi Gladstein [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Piling On: Norman Mailer’s Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]] and removed all the red errors. I also have finishe the Erin Mercer article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: The Naked and the Dead]], except the ''The Naked and the Dead'' in the display title. An error occured.
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 19:26, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work. There should be no footnotes in the endnotes, please. Since this is the only thing to correct, I have removed the banner, but please let me know when you made that final correction. Thanks! (I will respond about your second article shortly.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:59, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} your second article looks good. Could you use the [[w:Template:Cite interview|Template:Cite interview]] for interviews. I did one for you. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:33, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Through the Lens of the Beatniks Remediation ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas! I've completed the remediation of [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Through_the_Lens_of_the_Beatniks:_Norman_Mailer_and_Modern_American_Man’s_Quest_for_Self-Realization#CITEREFNaked1992|Through the Lens of the Beatniks]]. I wasn't able to get the letter citations exactly how I thought they should be. If there's anything I'm missing, please let me know! Thanks! [[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 10:09, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} got it! It looks great. I made some format changes, but you did a great job! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 15:58, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Finish Mimi ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}

I have made the final edit to Mimi and removed the footnotes from the endnotes. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe]] [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 15:50, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you removed all the citations. Only '''footnotes''' need to be removed, but citations need to stay. I did the first note for you (now erased, but you can see it in the history) so you could see how it was done. You can also see [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer|this one]]. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:52, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed? All You Need is Glove ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe the book review, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/All_You_Need_is_Glove|All You Need is Glove]] is done and ready for review! [[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 19:10, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} awesome work! Banner removed, and many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:08, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harv and Sfn no-target ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I changed the citations in the article to interview and I tried a few things to get rid of the Harv and Sfn no-target with little luck. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Automatons_and_the_Atomic_Abyss:_The_Naked_and_the_Dead]]
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:04, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} this was because your interviews had no dates. Most are from Lennon's book, published in 1988. I added the dates to the citations, but the sfn footnotes need to be fixed to correspond with those. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 16 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} OK, between your fixes and my little tweaks, this one is finished! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:50, 17 April 2025 (EDT)

== Erros fixed ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have fixed all citation errors in both articles and added the harvtxt. Atomic Abyss still has the Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls error.
[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Automatons_and_the_Atomic_Abyss:_The_Naked_and_the_Dead]]
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} see above. These still need fixing. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe]]
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} this one looks great! Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 08:23, 15 April 2025 (EDT)

== completed: Advertisements for Others ==

Thanks to some classmates helping with the finishing touches, my second article should be ready. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Advertisements_for_Others:_The_Blurbs_of_Norman_Mailer|Advertisements for Others.]]
--[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 19:24, 17 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to| NrmMGA5108}} received, and thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:15, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== Two Poems Vol 4 Ready? ==

Hi Dr. Lucas! I think these two poems are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The Boxer in the Park|The Boxer in the Park]] and Norman Mailer and [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer_and_Ernest_Hemingway_Do_Not_Box_in_Heaven|Ernest Hemingway Do Not Box in Heaven]]. The second on says the display title is wrong, but again, I don't know what I am missing there. Thank you![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 09:05, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway ==

Hey,

I see that [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway|A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway]] is missing text. Can you email me a copy or link it as a reply, so I can remediate this article. [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 09:44, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} you may download both volumes’ PDFs on the [https://forum.grlucas.net/t/project-mailer-assignments-remediation-project/88/3?u=grlucas forum]. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:40, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== Almost complete ==

@grlucas
I've made a ton of progress.
The only thing I have left is going through all of the links to do away with harvtxt and sfn target error and an error for extra text in the author section. I fixed the error about using an "en" dash between years.
I'll still be working on it until tomorrow night, but please take a look: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Hemingway_and_Women_at_the_Front:_Blowing_Bridges_in_The_Fifth_Column,_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls,_and_Other_Works

== Articles complete ==

@grlucas
I have also made a lot of progress with my articles and luckily received a last minute assit from a few of my class mates. I beleive both volumes to be complete: Vol 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D (Which I believe has already been submitted) and Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law (I just received the final error correction from a fellow student.

I also started working on this Vol 4 article once I got back into the system: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway%27s_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches in my sandbox https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:KWatson/sandbox but another user has already completed it.

Please review my articles and advise what else is needed from me. Thank you [[User:KWatson|KWatson]] ([[User talk:KWatson|talk]]) 15:37, 19 April 2025 (EDT)

== Additional edits ==

Hello! I reformatted all in text citations, did some editing, and added page numbers to [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]]- could you please take a look at the updated page and see if there's anything additional that it needs?

I was also wondering: on this page, I had also recieved confirmation from you that my previously assigned article (The American Civil War, will update with link in AM) was complete, and the banner could be removed. However, it is still showing as an X on the page, and I am unable to find the comment from you! Could you please clarify if anything needs to be fixed? Thanks so much!
[[User:KaraCroissant|KaraCroissant]] ([[User talk:KaraCroissant|talk]]) 16:25, 19 April 2025 (EDT)

== Civil War..Dispatched. ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}

I believe the Hemingway's Spanish Civil War is complete except the harvtext were not working. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway's_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches]]
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 17:37, 19 April 2025 (EDT)

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-19T04:45:06Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violence-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war—World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject-or-object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga'' (1891) represent this new attempt at constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history, one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from cannons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. Firsthand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shellshock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in ''Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War'' argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

{{pg| 315 | 316}}

== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson, "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ''ARIT'' projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

{{pg| 316 | 317}}

the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}} {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

{{pg| 317 | 318}}

trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external deus ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering {{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “retelling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

{{pg| 319 | 320}}

War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ''ARIT'', that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ''ARIT'' and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of ''NAD'', is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

''ARIT'' utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. ''NAD'' engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ''ARIT'' encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ''ARIT'' embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ''ARIT.'' These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in ''Across the River and into the Trees'' reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'''' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ''ARIT'' a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ''ARIT''. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that ''NAD'' displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, the Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ''ARIT'' Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the 20th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war."{{sfn|Hemingway|1876|p=255}} In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ''ARIT'' illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from ''NAD'', Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of ''NAD'', General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=716}} </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-19T04:44:16Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violence-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war—World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject-or-object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga'' (1891) represent this new attempt at constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history, one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from cannons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. Firsthand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shellshock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in ''Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War'' argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson, "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ''ARIT'' projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}} {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external deus ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering {{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “retelling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ''ARIT'', that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ''ARIT'' and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of ''NAD'', is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

''ARIT'' utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. ''NAD'' engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ''ARIT'' encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ''ARIT'' embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ''ARIT.'' These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in ''Across the River and into the Trees'' reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'''' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ''ARIT'' a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ''ARIT''. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that ''NAD'' displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, the Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ''ARIT'' Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the 20th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war"{{sfn|Hemingway|1876|p=255}}. In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ''ARIT'' illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from ''NAD'', Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of ''NAD'', General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=716}} </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-19T04:35:59Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violence-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war—World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject-or-object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga'' (1891) represent this new attempt at constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history, one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from cannons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. Firsthand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shellshock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in ''Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War'' argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

{{pg| 315 | 316}}

== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson, "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ''ARIT'' projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

{{pg| 316 | 317}}

the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}} {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

{{pg| 317 | 318}}

trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external deus ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering {{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “retelling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

{{pg| 319 | 320}}

War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ''ARIT'', that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ''ARIT'' and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of ''NAD'', is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

''ARIT'' utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. ''NAD'' engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ''ARIT'' encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ''ARIT'' embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ''ARIT.'' These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in ''Across the River and into the Trees'' reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'''' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ''ARIT'' a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ''ARIT''. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that ''NAD'' displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, the Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ''ARIT'' Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the 20th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“(255). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ''ARIT'' illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from ''NAD'', Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of ''NAD'', General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. (716) </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violence-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war—World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

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occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject-or-object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga'' (1891) represent this new attempt at constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history, one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

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fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from cannons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. Firsthand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shellshock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

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World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in ''Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War'' argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson, "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ''ARIT'' projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}} {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external deus ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering {{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “retelling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ''ARIT'', that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ''ARIT'' and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of ''NAD'', is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

''ARIT'' utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. ''NAD'' engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ''ARIT'' encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ''ARIT'' embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ''ARIT.'' These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in ''Across the River and into the Trees'' reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'''' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ''ARIT'' a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ''ARIT''. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that ''NAD'' displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, the Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ''ARIT'' Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the 20th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (255). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. (716) </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-19T04:21:55Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violence-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war—World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject-or-object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga'' (1891) represent this new attempt at constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history, one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from cannons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. Firsthand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shellshock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in ''Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War'' argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson, "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ''ARIT'' projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}} {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external deus ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering {{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “retelling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ''ARIT'', that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ''ARIT'' and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of ''NAD'', is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

''ARIT'' utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. ''NAD'' engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ''ARIT'' encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ''ARIT'' embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ''ARIT.'' These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in ''Across the River and into the Trees'' reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'''' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ''ARIT'' a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ''ARIT''. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that ''NAD'' displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, the Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

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narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

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premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

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soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

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what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (255). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. (716) </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-19T04:15:58Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violence-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war—World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject-or-object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga'' (1891) represent this new attempt at constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history, one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from cannons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. Firsthand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shellshock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in ''Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War'' argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

{{pg| 315 | 316}}

== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson, "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ''ARIT'' projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

{{pg| 316 | 317}}

the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}} {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

{{pg| 317 | 318}}

trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external deus ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering {{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “retelling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

{{pg| 319 | 320}}

War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ''ARIT'', that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ''ARIT'' and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of ''NAD'', is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

''ARIT'' utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. ''NAD'' engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ARIT. These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and into the Trees reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (255). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. (716) </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-19T04:12:53Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violence-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war—World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject-or-object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga'' (1891) represent this new attempt at constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history, one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

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fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from cannons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. Firsthand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shellshock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

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World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in ''Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War'' argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson,“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}} {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external deus ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering {{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “retelling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ARIT. These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and into the Trees reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

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narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (255). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. (716) </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-19T04:06:27Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violence-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war—World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject-or-object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga'' (1891) represent this new attempt at constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history, one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from cannons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. Firsthand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shellshock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in ''Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War'' argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

{{pg| 315 | 316}}

== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson,“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}} {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external deus ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering {{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ARIT. These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and into the Trees reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

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narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

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premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

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soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

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what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (255). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. (716) </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

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written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-19T03:46:59Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violence-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war—World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

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occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject-or-object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga'' (1891) represent this new attempt at constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history, one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

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fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from cannons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. Firsthand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shellshock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in ''Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War'' argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson,“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

{{pg| 316 | 317}}

the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}} {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

{{pg| 317 | 318}}

trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering{{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

{{pg| 319 | 320}}

War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ARIT. These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and into the Trees reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (255). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. (716) </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-19T03:46:13Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violence-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war—World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject-or-object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga'' (1891) represent this new attempt at constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history, one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from cannons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. Firsthand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shellshock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

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World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in ''Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War'' argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson,“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}} {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering{{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ARIT. These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and into the Trees reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

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premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (255). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. (716) </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-19T03:31:16Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violence-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war—World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject-or-object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga'' (1891) represent this new attempt at constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history, one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from cannons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. Firsthand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shellshock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in ''Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War'' argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

{{pg| 315 | 316}}

== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson,“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}}. {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering{{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ARIT. These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and into the Trees reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

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narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

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premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

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soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

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what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (255). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. (716) </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

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written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-19T03:29:34Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violence-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war—World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

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occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject-or-object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga'' (1891) represent this new attempt at constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history, one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from cannons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. Firsthand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shellshock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

{{pg| 315 | 316}}

== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson,“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

{{pg| 316 | 317}}

the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}}. {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

{{pg| 317 | 318}}

trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering{{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

{{pg| 319 | 320}}

War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ARIT. These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and into the Trees reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (255). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. (716) </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-19T03:28:40Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violence-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war—World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject-or-object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga'' (1891) represent this new attempt at constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history, one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from cannons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. Firsthand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”{{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

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World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson,“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}}. {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering{{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ARIT. These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and into the Trees reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

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premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (255). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. (716) </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-19T03:22:31Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violence-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war—World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject-or-object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”{{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

{{pg| 315 | 316}}

== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson,“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}}. {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering{{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ARIT. These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and into the Trees reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

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narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

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premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

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soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

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what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (255). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. (716) </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

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written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-19T03:22:19Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violence-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war—World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

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occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject-or-object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga'' (1891) represent this new attempt at constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history, one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”{{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson,“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

{{pg| 316 | 317}}

the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}}. {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

{{pg| 317 | 318}}

trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering{{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

{{pg| 319 | 320}}

War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ARIT. These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and into the Trees reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (255). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. (716) </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-19T03:01:48Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violence-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war—World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject-or-object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”{{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

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World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson,“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}}. {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering{{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ARIT. These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and into the Trees reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

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premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (255). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. (716) </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T08:23:48Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”{{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

{{pg| 315 | 316}}

== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson,“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}}. {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering{{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ARIT. These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and into the Trees reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

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narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

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premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

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soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

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what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (255). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. (716) </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

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written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T08:19:29Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”{{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

{{pg| 315 | 316}}

== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson,“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

{{pg| 316 | 317}}

the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}}. {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

{{pg| 317 | 318}}

trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering{{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

{{pg| 319 | 320}}

War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ARIT. These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and into the Trees reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=3}}. The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” {{sfn|Caruth|1996|p=62}}. The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=131}}. Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=196}}</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” {{sfn|Stonebridge|2009|p=197}}. Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=411}} </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T08:15:01Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts {{sfn|Nagel|1989|p=213}}. The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life {{sfn|Keene|2001|p=49}}. The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” {{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=12}}. Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”{{sfn|Craig & Egan|1979|p=13}}. Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” {{sfn|Ouditt|2005|p=255}}. The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

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World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II {{sfn|Dawes|2002|p=157}}. The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''Private Fleming''.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees'' and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war {{sfn|Fussell|1989|p=267}}.

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson,“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=477}}. While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=294}}. For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative {{sfn|Seigel|1974|p=295}}. The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” {{sfn|Cooke|1876|p=485}}. {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering{{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In ''Across the River'', Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?” (230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” {{sfn|Tal|1996|p=117}}. As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” {{sfn|Talk|1950|p=12}}. Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in ''Soldier’s Tale'' of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ARIT. These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and into the Trees reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

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narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

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premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T07:18:11Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage and Private Fleming.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that "without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

{{pg| 315 | 316}}

== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson,“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

{{pg| 316 | 317}}

the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. It’s all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.” Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

{{pg| 317 | 318}}

trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering{{efn|Cathy Caruth asserts that “[l]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience meet”(3). In Across the River, Hemingway echoes Caruth’s point as Cantwell asks himself, “How can I remember if I am not bitter?”(230). Cantwell’s question illustrates the complex relation between the knowing and not knowing which arises in trauma. More importantly, his question focuses on the very nature of attempting to remember from the abject position of trauma.}} to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a 1950 interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that "I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.

Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,
<blockquote>It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village, and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them? (“Art” 10–1)</blockquote>
Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ARIT. These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and into the Trees reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).
Hemingway’s ''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

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premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

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soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

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written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T07:07:00Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

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occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

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fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

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World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage and Private Fleming.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that“without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson,“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma.{{efn|Hemingway, in “Battle for Paris,” observes, “during this epoch I was addressed as ‘Captain.’ This is a very low rank to have at the age of forty-five years, and so, in the presence of strangers, they would address me, usually, as ‘Colonel.’ But they were a little upset and worried by my low rank. . . The main highlights of this period that I remember, outside of being scared a number of times, are not publishable at this time. Sometime I would like to be able to write an account of the actions of the colonel both by day and by night. But you cannot write it yet” (By-line 370–371).}} Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' {{efn|In ARIT, Hemingway opens the novel by presenting Colonel Richard Cantwell’s memories that occur in the past. These moments appear early in the narrative as an interior representation of an objective self. Cantwell remembers, “That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday, he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road . . . he relaxed [and] looked out all this country he had known when he was a boy”(21).Hemingway’s use of a frame device in the novel, according to John Paul Russo, is one that provokes an unsettling, uncanny response (155). The placement of the majority of the novel as focused on Cantwell’s memories give subjective voice to his interior landscape. Thus, Hemingway’s representations of memory and remembering in ARIT imbricate creating a protagonist who differs from Hemingway’s prior heroes. In the novel, Cantwell does not operate objectively nor does he operate subjectively; instead, he encompasses another space that seeks to find understanding through his memories of a lifetime of war trauma.}} and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

{{pg| 316 | 317}}

the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative.{{efn| Cantwell is not simply concerned with the experience (i.e. Being in it) nor is he merely concerned with thinking about the experience. This protagonist oscillates between the two representations creating the idea, as E.M. Halliday expresses, that external action is inadequate to internal meaning. In the narrative, Cantwell’s memories and understanding of the effects of war are more privileged then his actual experiences. A Cantwell figure relies on the importance of memory to make sense of his world. This character type is a post-war protagonist who has no choice but to assume a different level of narrative subjectivity when constructing meaning.}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). {{efn|On Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured—the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days. On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered,“Very good. It’s all right.”He declined brandy and water and said,“It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last.”Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield—then he was at the mess table talking to his staff—now with his wife and child—now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died, he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. “Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks”—then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief, "Let's us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” and then seemingly in peace he died (“Ernest”).}} Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

{{pg| 317 | 318}}

trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

{{pg| 319 | 320}}

War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a  interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that“I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.
Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T06:54:19Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma.{{efn| The placement occurs in American war fiction beginning with Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage and Private Fleming.}} In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives{{efn|Notions of traumatic war remembrance in Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead offer a component and link to the influence of the trauma of war on modern fiction. Elaine Scarry notes that“without memory, our awareness would be confined to an eternal present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning” (1). In this context, Mailer’s early characters appearing in his first novel and Hemingway’s later characters like Cantwell experience remembrance in a different fashion than the earlier characters in American fiction. The act of remembrance operates as a method for attempting to understand the interior self in reference to the exterior world. The memory of World War I operates similarly as it lies like a palism past beneath the surface of modern American fiction. The desire to locate meaning through an attempted recollection of past traumas echoes from the first international trauma, World War I. The post-World War I literature seeks to explore understanding through the remembrance of an exterior world fraught with trauma.}} that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

{{pg| 315 | 316}}

== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957){{efn|. Hemingway’s title selection for the work references his desire to explore the effects of war and trauma. The title of the work is a paraphrase of the last words of Civil War Leader Stonewall Jackson,“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, the title highlights a different subjectivity from Jackson: a subjectivity that in Hemingway does not involve a “you” or an “I.” Instead, this narrative speaks not from the objective you or the subjective I but instead from the space of the abjective.}} and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma. Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

{{pg| 316 | 317}}

the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative. Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

{{pg| 317 | 318}}

trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

{{pg| 319 | 320}}

War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a  interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that“I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.
Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T06:46:11Z

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

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occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

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fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

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World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957) and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma. Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative. Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a  interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that“I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.
Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

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premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T06:39:50Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

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occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

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fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss.{{efn|The rapid and decisive destruction of villages, homes, peoples, and ways of life in the modern warfare of World War I, according to Meredith, illustrates a rapid acceleration of time. This acceleration operates as the spiritual enemy of mankind, and accordingly, for Meredith, places time as a major preoccupation of the modern literary and artistic sensibility. See James H. Meredith’s “Fitzgerald and War” in Kirk Curnett’s A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald.}} The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

{{pg| 315 | 316}}

== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957) and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma. Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

{{pg| 316 | 317}}

the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative. Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

{{pg| 317 | 318}}

trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

{{pg| 319 | 320}}

War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a  interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that“I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.
Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T06:38:04Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness.{{efn|Ernest Hemingway, like many of his fellow young men, seeks to become involved in the war; however, due to his myopic vision, he is deemed unsuitable for military service.}} The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss. The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

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World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957) and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma. Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative. Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a  interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that“I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.
Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

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narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

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premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

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soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

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what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

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written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T06:31:43Z

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

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occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

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fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness. The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss. The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

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World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957) and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma. Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative. Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a  interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that“I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.
Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |chapter= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|chapter= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of ''The Naked and the Dead''|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Stonebridge|first= Lyndsey|date= 2009|chapter= Theories of Trauma|title= The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II|url= |location= Cambridge|editor-last= MacKay| editor-first= Marina|publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= 194-206|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Tal|first= Kali|date= 1996|title= Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Craig|date= 2009|title= Scars to Prove It: The Civil War and American Fiction|url= |location= Kent, OH|publisher= Kent State UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Warren|first= Robert Penn|date= 1961|title= The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T06:22:24Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

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occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

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fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness. The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss. The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

{{pg| 315 | 316}}

== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957) and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma. Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

{{pg| 316 | 317}}

the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative. Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

{{pg| 317 | 318}}

trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

{{pg| 319 | 320}}

War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a  interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that“I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.
Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|series= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= Seigel|first= Paul|title= The Malign Deity of The Naked and the Dead|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/440647?searchText=%22The+Malign+Deity+of+The+Naked+and+the+Dead.%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%25E2%2580%259CThe%2BMalign%2BDeity%2Bof%2BThe%2BNaked%2Band%2Bthe%2BDead.%25E2%2580%259D%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A860fd65792a7a2d0eb7d576b455cae0f&seq=1|journal= Twentieth Century Literature|volume=20 |issue=4 |date= 1974|pages= 291-297|access-date= April 10, 2010|ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T06:15:33Z

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness. The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss. The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

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World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957) and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma. Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative. Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a  interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that“I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.
Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

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narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

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premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

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soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

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what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

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written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|series= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last1= Nagel|first1= James|last2= Villard|first2= Henry S.|date=1989 |title= Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky|url= |location= Boston|publisher= Northeastern UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Ouditt|first= Sharon|date= 2005|chapter= Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War|title= The Literature of the First World War|url= |location= Cambridge|publisher= Cambridge UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= John Paul|date= 1990|chapter= To Die is Not Enough; Hemingway’s Venetian Novel|title= Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Lewis |editor-first= Robert W.|publisher= Praeger |pages= 153-80|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Scarry|first= Elaine|date= 2000|chapter= Introduction|title= Memory, Brain, and Belief|url= |location= Cambridge, MA|editor-last1= Scarry|editor-first1= Elaine|editor-last2= Schacter|editor-first2= Daniel L.|publisher= Harvard UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T06:05:40Z

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

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occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

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fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness. The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss. The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

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World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957) and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma. Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative. Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a  interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that“I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.
Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

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premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|series= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= Meredith|first= James| author-mask=1| date= 2004| title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare| location= Lanham, MD| editor-last1= Munson Deats| editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker| editor-first2= Lagretta| editor-last3= Perry| editor-first3= Merry G.| publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T06:04:21Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness. The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss. The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

{{pg| 315 | 316}}

== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957) and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma. Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

{{pg| 316 | 317}}

the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative. Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

{{pg| 317 | 318}}

trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

{{pg| 319 | 320}}

War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a  interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that“I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.
Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|series= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book|last= |first= |author-mask=1|date= 2004|title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare|location= Lanham, MD|editor-last1= Munson Deats|editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker|editor-first2= Lagretta|editor-last3= Perry|editor-first3= Merry G.|publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T06:03:07Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

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occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness. The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss. The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

{{pg| 315 | 316}}

== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957) and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma. Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

{{pg| 316 | 317}}

the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative. Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

{{pg| 317 | 318}}

trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

{{pg| 319 | 320}}

War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a  interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that“I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.
Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James H.|date= 2004|title= A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzherald|series= Fitzgerald and War|url= |location=Oxford|editor-last= Curnett |editor-first= Kirk |publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last= |first= |author-mask=1|date= 2004|title= War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare|location= Lanham, MD|editor-last1= Munson Deats|editor-first1= Sara| editor-last2= Talent Lenker|editor-first2= Lagretta|editor-last3= Perry|editor-first3= Merry G.|publisher= Lexington Books |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Meredith|first= James|author-mask=1|date= 1999|chapter = Understanding Hemingway’s Multiple Voices of War: A Rhetorical Study|title= Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents |location= Westport, CT| publisher= Greenwood Press |ref=harv}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T05:52:51Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness. The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss. The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

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World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957) and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma. Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative. Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a  interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that“I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.
Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

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narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

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premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

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soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

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what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

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written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Limon|first= John|date= 1994|title= Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism|url= |location= New York|publisher= Oxford UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1948|title= The Naked and the Dead|url= |location= New York|publisher= Reinhart and Co.|pages= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T05:49:10Z

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

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occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

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fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness. The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss. The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

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World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957) and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma. Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative. Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a  interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that“I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.
Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

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narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

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premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

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soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

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what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

* {{cite book |last= Kristeva|first= Julia|date= 1986|title= The Kristeva Reader|url= |location= New York|editor-last= Moi|editor-first= Toril| publisher= Columbia UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Kristeva |first=Julia|author-mask=1|date=1997 |title= The Portable Kristeva |location=New York |editor-last= Oliver|editor-first= Kelly| publisher=Columbia UP |ref=harv}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T05:44:51Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

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occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

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fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness. The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss. The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957) and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma. Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

{{pg| 316 | 317}}

the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative. Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

{{pg| 317 | 318}}

trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

{{pg| 319 | 320}}

War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a  interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that“I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.
Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War|url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T05:43:25Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

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occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness. The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss. The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

{{pg| 315 | 316}}

== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957) and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma. Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

{{pg| 316 | 317}}

the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative. Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

{{pg| 317 | 318}}

trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

{{pg| 319 | 320}}

War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a  interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that“I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.
Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

* {{cite book |last= Hynes|first= Samuel|date= 1997|title= |url= |location= New York |publisher= Penguin Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Keene |first= Jennifer D.|date= 2001|title= Doughboys, and the great War, and the Remaking of America|url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= John Hopkins UP|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{Cite journal| last = Kinder| first = John M.| title = The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor| journal = Midwest Quarterly| volume = 46| issue = 2| year = 2005|pages = 187–202}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T05:37:21Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

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occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness. The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss. The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

{{pg| 315 | 316}}

== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957) and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma. Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

{{pg| 316 | 317}}

the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative. Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

{{pg| 317 | 318}}

trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

{{pg| 318 | 319}}

structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

{{pg| 319 | 320}}

War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a  interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that“I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.
Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

{{pg| 320 | 321}}

place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

{{pg| 321 | 322}}

narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

{{pg| 322 | 323}}

premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

{{pg| 323 | 324}}

soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

{{pg| 324 | 325}}

what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

{{pg| 325 | 326}}

written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| date = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

2025-04-18T05:36:25Z

Priley1984:

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

{{pg| 311 | 312}}

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.{{efn|See Cathy Caruth’s exploration of Freud’s treatment of trauma appearing in Unclaimed Experience (4–5).}} The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

== NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR ==

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s ''Chickamauga''(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in ''The Legacy of the Civil War'' argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

{{pg| 312 | 313}}

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness. The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) ''Death of a Hero'' and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

{{pg| 313 | 314}}

because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss. The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

{{pg| 314 | 315}}

World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.

The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

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== HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII ==

Ernest Hemingway’s ''''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1957) and Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma. Instead, Hemingway’s oft-dismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s ''NAD'' is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ''ARIT''—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ''ARIT'' and ''NAD''—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (295). The coupling of the terms “naked” with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative. Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ''ARIT'', reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke 485). Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first- or third-person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

<blockquote> remind postwar readers of what was already being excised (both deliberately and inadvertently) from Americans’ memory of World War II. Drawing upon his own experience as an infantryman, Mailer takes great care to highlight the brutality of combat and the physical and mental abuse suffered by “common soldiers” throughout the war. {{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=191}}</blockquote>

The narrative evolution occurring in Mailer and Hemingway emboldens a different type of narrative structure that takes the tragedy of trauma not only as subject matter for the fiction but, more important, takes the experience of the tragedy of trauma as structure. This evolved form of narrative is a tragedy not involving hegemonic, external dei ex machina and internal heroic flaws as the impetus for the structure of the fiction, but a narrative structure that instead uses the previously silenced experience of suffering to generate and provide structure for the narrative.

== NARRATIVE CALCULUS AND THE WW II FICTION OF
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

The trauma of war as a structural template reveals changes occurring in the narrative structuring of fiction following the World Wars. Narrative

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structures prior to the World War periods often engage a linear and equational method for presenting the story. In the traditional linear narrative tradition of pre-World War I and II literature, fictions are presented and structured in a manner reminiscent of arithmetic and geometry. For instance, narratives like Stephen Crane’s ''The Red Badge of Courage'' utilize a structure that presents the experience of war chronologically. The focus in this war narrative is on the movement of the story through the traditional elements of time and space. The narratives following the Civil War, like Crane’s work, appear to be focused on presenting elements of the narrative—character, plot, and point of view—in a traditionally straightforward manner and point to the idea that the solution to the narrative’s content and structure can be understood vis-á-vis the computation of various elements of the story. In many ways, these post war narratives hold tenuously to the personal subjective and objective fictions surrounding war and trauma.

The experience of the first two wars offers a necessary counterbalance to the narrative arithmetic and geometry—which upholds traditional narrative and cultural fictions of war trauma—presented in the content and the structures of the earlier war narratives. The elements deployed in the narrative arithmetic and geometry from the prior narrative structures still retain a place of prominence in the work occurring during and following the wars. Increasingly the narratives following the Great War and World War II effect a changed narrative action in relation to the experience of war trauma on the author’s narrative epistemology. Kali Tal suggests that “re-telling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel does not merely involve the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of lot and literary technique, but the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (). As the structure of war and trauma evolves, the narrative structures reflect the changes experienced on the idea of the personal subjective point of view in the structures of narratives as a result of war and trauma. A necessary change in structure is needed to address the evolving impact of trauma on the population’s evolving understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and, concomitantly on the fiction’s presentation of point of view and self.

Hemingway’s fiction progresses from a reliance on a narrative arithmetic and geometry into a different and changed narrative structure relative to his engagement with war trauma in his fiction. Following Hemingway’s time spent as an embedded correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and in World

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War II, his writing—in content and structure—no longer focuses only on presenting the arithmetic—the subjects and objects of his stories—or the geometry—shapes and senses evoked by his stories—or the algebra— equations and consequences apparent in the themes of his stories. Hemingway asserts, in a  interview with Harvey Breit concerning the narrative construction of ARIT, that“I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Hemingway, “Talk” ). Hemingway’s focus on crafting a text using a narrative calculus is not just about treating or representing an inner reconciliation to the outer experience of trauma in the fiction. Instead, the emphasis is on the play between the inner and the outer effects as a result of trauma on the structure of the narrative. As calculus is the study of change, of space, and of time, Hemingway draws attention to the manner in which change is represented in the structure of a narrative as a result of the experience of trauma in war. Hemingway seeks to capture the illusive element of change, space, and time in his narrative construction mirroring of the experience of trauma in the structure of the narrative.
Calculus, as the study of change and space, operates as a narrative method for structuring the presentation and representation of the trauma of war in fiction. The study of change, which Hemingway engages in the narrative structure of calculus in ARIT and Mailer appropriates in the structuring of NAD, is illustrated through the memory of war and trauma in the narratives. Samuel Hynes observes in Soldier’s Tale of the effect of war trauma on the construction and structuring of narratives involving the experience of war trauma. Hynes observes that

<blockquote> there are the inflicted sufferings of war—the wounds, the fears, the hardships . . . there is something else that is done to men by wars: no man goes through a war without being changed by it . . . and though that process will not be explicit in every narrative—not all men are self-conscious or reflective enough for that—it will be there. {{sfn|Hynes|1997|p=3}}</blockquote>

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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place. These evolved structural adaptations can be seen through the specific experiences and re-experiences of soldiers. Exploring Hemingway’s widely panned novel and Mailer’s widely lauded work focusing on the effects of trauma on the structure of the narrative represents an opportunity to examine how the narrative calculus contributes to understanding the evolution of the narrative structure.
The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” (). In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology ().These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving

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narrative calculus in his ARIT Mailer, too, plays with a variety of narrative positions in his novel in relation to trauma in war. The shifts in person, place, and even in thought contribute to providing a narrative voice to a previously silenced voicing of the experience of trauma during war. Mailer’s novel opens with, “Nobody could sleep” and continues in the second paragraph with “[a] solider lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide awake” (Naked ). In this passage, the narrative voice assumes a point-of-view situation that operates without a traditional deployment of narrative subjectivity or objectivity. This altered point of view is illustrated in the focus presented through the experience of “nobody,” and then it is further engaged by the assumption of a narrative position relegated to war trauma—“a soldier” (). The opening passages of the novel illustrate a shifting point of view in the structure of the novel that moves beyond traditional subjective and objective narrative presentations of war trauma.

== TRAUMATIC POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND WAR IN HEMINGWAY AND MAILER ==

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s focus on capturing the traumas of modern war and experience engages and deploys a testimony of questioning and confusion related to the trauma of war. The experience of trauma, in war, often is illustrated in the fictional narratives of war as not simply the threatening of one’s life but the recognition of the threat by the mind as occurring “one moment too late” (Caruth ). The necessity and impossibility of truly grasping the threat to one’s life is repeatedly confronted by both the act of survival and the traumatic experience itself. Thus, in the fictional retellings of traumas in narratives, the attempt is made to capture both the timeliness and timelessness of the experience of trauma. However, conventional narrative structures often do not allow the space or place for the representation of these abject understandings or experiences. The inability of traditional narrative structures to embody and reflect the experience of trauma in a narrative relates to the structuring of these conventional narratives which follow the lines of narrative arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning

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premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war.

The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that

<blockquote> the only thing accidental about the experience of fighting in the trenches in the first war was that one managed to survive at all; nonetheless it was shell-shock that confirmed that the trauma of war, similarly, could obliterate the time of the mind . . . What could be described as a traumatic temporality set the terms for much literary and cultural modernism for the first part of the th century—as well as what was to follow. Freud’s originality was to insist that trauma not only had an effect on the mind, but that it constituted what we think of as human subjectivity itself. ()</blockquote>

In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the

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soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals.

The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that

<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>

In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.

In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and

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what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.

Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.

At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that

<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>

Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies

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written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= Baker |first= Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Caruth |first= Cathy |date= 1996|title= Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History.| url= |location= Baltimore |publisher= John Hopkins UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |last= Cooke |first= John Esten|date= 1876 |title= Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography |url= https://www.gutenberg.org/ |location= New York |publisher= D. Appleton and Company |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last1= Craig |first1= David |last2= Egan |first2= Michael |date= 1979 |title= Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War |url= |location= Totowa, N.J.|publisher= Barnes & Noble Books |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Dawes |first= James |date= 2002 |title= The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II |url= |location= Cambridge, Mass |publisher= Harvard UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virtual-hemingway |title= Lost Generation |last= |first= |date= |website= Hemingway Resource Center |publisher= |access-date= August 31, 2010 |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Fussell |first= Paul |date= 1989 |title= Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |publisher= Oxford UP | pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Halliday |first= E.M. |date= 1962 |title= Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels |series= Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective|url= |location= New York |editor-last= Baker| editor-first= Carlos|publisher= Scribner |pages= 174-82|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hemingway |first= Ernest |date= 1998 |title= Across the River and into the Trees |url= |location= |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1990 |title=New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Durnham |editor-last= Benson|editor-first= Jackson J.|publisher=Duke UP|pages= 1-16 |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1967 |title= By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades |location=New York |editor-last= White|editor-first= William| publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}

{{cite book| last = Breit| first = Harvey|author-mask=1| title = Talk With Mr. Hemingway| contribution = Interview| work = Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference| editor-first = Robert| editor-last = Trogdon| publisher = Carroll and Graf Publishers| location = New York| year = 1999| pages = 273–274| work = The New York Times Book Review| date = 1950-09-17| pages = 14}}