The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead: Premiere to Eternity?: Difference between revisions
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Defenders of Jones’s style cast light on its positive and negative criticism. For example, Tom Carson writes, “[A]t its crowded, vernacular best [the prose] does just what he wanted to do, involve you in the events, and put you inside the characters’ heads with striking veracity and conviction”. {{sfn|Carson|1984|p=19}} George Garrett writes that “Jones, as he wrote ''Running'', was involved in an experiment with language, a kind of discovery . . . he calls it working with ‘colloquial forms’ by which he means not merely the free and easy use of the living, spoken American language on dialogue or first-person narration but an attempt to carry it into the narrative itself, into third-person narration”.{{sfn|Carson|1984|p=116}} These defenses focus on that aspect of Jones’s writing that his critics seem to stress as his weakest attribute: his writing style. | Defenders of Jones’s style cast light on its positive and negative criticism. For example, Tom Carson writes, “[A]t its crowded, vernacular best [the prose] does just what he wanted to do, involve you in the events, and put you inside the characters’ heads with striking veracity and conviction”. {{sfn|Carson|1984|p=19}} George Garrett writes that “Jones, as he wrote ''Running'', was involved in an experiment with language, a kind of discovery . . . he calls it working with ‘colloquial forms’ by which he means not merely the free and easy use of the living, spoken American language on dialogue or first-person narration but an attempt to carry it into the narrative itself, into third-person narration”.{{sfn|Carson|1984|p=116}} These defenses focus on that aspect of Jones’s writing that his critics seem to stress as his weakest attribute: his writing style. | ||
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One concentration of stylistic criticism seems to focus on Jones’s attempts to put readers “inside the characters’ heads” {{sfn|Carson|1984|p=19}} | One concentration of stylistic criticism seems to focus on Jones’s attempts to put readers “inside the characters’ heads” .{{sfn|Carson|1984|p=19}} This mainly consists of the use of the first-person indirect and free indirect, in which movement between a third-person mimicry of a character’s consciousness approaching stream of consciousness and authorial comment on characters’ consciousness or simple third person occurs, for Jones seldom lapses into the first person in ‘third person’ fictions like ''Eternity'' and ''Running''. This second paragraph of the book’s first page, already quoted above, illustrates the sort of writing: | ||
<blockquote>Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust came up a muted orchestra of sounds: the clankings of steel wheeled carts bouncing over the brick, the slap- ping of oiled leather slingstraps.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote> | <blockquote>Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust came up a muted orchestra of sounds: the clankings of steel wheeled carts bouncing over the brick, the slap- ping of oiled leather slingstraps.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote> | ||
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So does the third paragraph of ''Eternity’s'' opening: | So does the third paragraph of ''Eternity’s'' opening: | ||
<blockquote>Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them without denying with them the | <blockquote>Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them by denying the place they have given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote> | ||
A second concentration of stylistic criticism refers to instances of straightforward third-person narration, a voice mainly confined to the tellingly | A second concentration of stylistic criticism refers to instances of straightforward third-person narration, a voice mainly confined to the tellingly italsized introductory pages to “Book Four: The Stockade.” | ||
Examples of the first sort of faulted writing mainly occur when Jones | Examples of the first sort of faulted writing mainly occur when Jones gages in extended attempts at first-person indirect and free indirect, and his language grows either too arcane to ring true as a plausible voice of the character overheard or too oddly vernacular to work as a shift into authorial voice. Even writing in a tone ostensibly close to a character, Jones may move into an oddly eccentric rhetoric that manages to violate the standards of verisimilitude in the mimicry of a character’s use of language required of the first-person indirect or the standards of good authorial rhetoric, or both standards at once. An example of a double violation arises in the early pages of “Book Four: The Stockade” where Jones describes Prewitt’s thoughts or feelings regarding “a great conflict of fear” that “lay rises flapping from the depth {{pg|327|328}}like a giant manta ray, looming larger and bigger, looming huge, up out of the green depths that you can look down into through a water glass and see the anchor cable dwindling in a long arch down into invisibility, up from far below that even, flapping the two wing fins of choice and ego caught square in the middle” place they have given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=410-411}} This refers to fears that Prewitt thinks his un- thinking candor precipitates in the minds of others (in this case fears of homosexuality in the mind of Maggio). | ||
Examples of the second sort of blemished writing arise in “Book Four: The Stockade” when we shift into an authorial voice far from that dramatic mode in which the book’s style approximates a dramatic mode in which the audience experiences content directly. In the straight-out italics with which “The Stockade” opens, Jones writes, “''He was held in confinement at the Stockade as a general prisoner while he waited for trial''”{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=405}} | Examples of the second sort of blemished writing arise in “Book Four: The Stockade” when we shift into an authorial voice far from that dramatic mode in which the book’s style approximates a dramatic mode in which the audience experiences content directly. In the straight-out italics with which “The Stockade” opens, Jones writes, “''He was held in confinement at the Stockade as a general prisoner while he waited for trial''”.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=405}} Clearly, “awaited” is the appropriate word. Later, still writing in a straight-forward third-person narrator (or omniscient narrator) voice, Jones describes the “many officers, officers’ wives and officers’ children” near Honolulu’s “tennis courts, golf course, and bridle paths as all are looking very tanned and sportive”. {{sfn|Jones|1951|p=409}}. Clearly, ‘sporty’ is the appropriate word. | ||
In defense of Jones’s prose, Garrett refers to innovations with “colloquial forms” by Faulkner and O’Hara, and Carter extends this line of defense with a few brief evocations (e.g., of Bellow and Updike) {{sfn|Garrett|1984|p=116}}{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=39}} | In defense of Jones’s prose, Garrett refers to innovations with “colloquial forms” by Faulkner and O’Hara, and Carter extends this line of defense with a few brief evocations (e.g., of Bellow and Updike). {{sfn|Garrett|1984|p=116}}{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=39}} However, I do not find these lines of defense persuasive. Where I see no lapse in an author’s use of the first-person and free indirect (e.g., for O’Hara, Faulkner, and Bellow), the defense does not seem worth extended comment in the time and space available. (I think that Faulkner, O’Hara, and Bellow employ idiomatic English more adeptly in using the free indirect). | ||
I see such a lapse when Updike lapses into language too literary (e.g., too metaphorically ornate) to credibly reflect a character’s consciousness, which, compared to the stylistically masterful Updike, seems inappropriate, despite Updike’s lapses. Although I see some dubious use of idiomatic language in straightforward third-person narration divorced from the first-person indirect and free indirect in the work of William Faulkner, the comparison again seems generally inappropriate (i.e., too much a matter of an idiosyncratic syntax), as well as rather too complex for this effort. | I see such a lapse when Updike lapses into language too literary (e.g., too metaphorically ornate) to credibly reflect a character’s consciousness, which, compared to the stylistically masterful Updike, seems inappropriate, despite Updike’s lapses. Although I see some dubious use of idiomatic language in straightforward third-person narration divorced from the first-person indirect and free indirect in the work of William Faulkner, the comparison again seems generally inappropriate (i.e., too much a matter of an idiosyncratic syntax), as well as rather too complex for this effort. | ||
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The digression of the pros and cons of Jones’s possible stylistic shortcomings, where they turn up in Jones’s writing, seems less relevant to the assessment {{pg|328|329}}of that writing—''Eternity'', in particular—and seems less important than my defense of Jones. This focuses on how infrequently they turn up and how peripheral they are when they do turn up—most especially in ''From Here to Eternity''. In brief, the instances of poor writing that Jones’s stylistic critics have targeted tend to address occasional divergences from Jones’s best and most characteristic writing. This is a | The digression of the pros and cons of Jones’s possible stylistic shortcomings, where they turn up in Jones’s writing, seems less relevant to the assessment {{pg|328|329}}of that writing—''Eternity'', in particular—and seems less important than my defense of Jones. This focuses on how infrequently they turn up and how peripheral they are when they do turn up—most especially in ''From Here to Eternity''. In brief, the instances of poor writing that Jones’s stylistic critics have targeted tend to address occasional divergences from Jones’s best and most characteristic writing. This is a ‘transparent’ mode of writing focused on dialogue backed by incisive descriptions of action and setting backed up by preponderantly adept excursions into the first-person indirect and divorced—mostly divorced—from overt authorial voice. | ||
That mode of writing resembles Frye’s dramatic mode in which the author is hidden from the audience, and the audience “experiences content directly”{{sfn|Frye|1957|p=229}} | That mode of writing resembles Frye’s dramatic mode in which the author is hidden from the audience, and the audience “experiences content directly”.{{sfn|Frye|1957|p=229}} | ||
This mode provides almost all of the words of ''From Here to Eternity'' and ''Whistle''. It provides enough of Some Came Running to constitute nearly all of Jones’s 1958 Signet abridgment of Running. It perhaps does not apply well to ''The Thin Red Line'' because, in that novel, Jones is far more involved in using the free indirect, in which he shifts between dialogue and physical description. The first-person-son-indirect variant of stream of consciousness jumps so frequently and swiftly from consciousness to consciousness to virtually create a collective consciousness of ''Thin Red Line’s'' GIs. | This mode provides almost all of the words of ''From Here to Eternity'' and ''Whistle''. It provides enough of Some Came Running to constitute nearly all of Jones’s 1958 Signet abridgment of Running. It perhaps does not apply well to ''The Thin Red Line'' because, in that novel, Jones is far more involved in using the free indirect, in which he shifts between dialogue and physical description. The first-person-son-indirect variant of stream of consciousness jumps so frequently and swiftly from consciousness to consciousness to virtually create a collective consciousness of ''Thin Red Line’s'' GIs. | ||