Project Mailer

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead: Premiere to Eternity?: Difference between revisions

← Older editNewer edit →
m I'm not sure how much of the original text has been changed. We may have to delete and begin again.
THarrell (talk | contribs)
50 edits
undid grammar adjustments
Line 3: Line 3:
{{MR05}}<!-- EDIT BELOW THIS LINE -->
{{MR05}}<!-- EDIT BELOW THIS LINE -->
{{byline|last=Hicks|first=Alexander |abstract=A review of ''From Here To Eternity'' and ''The Naked and The Dead''. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr05hic}}
{{byline|last=Hicks|first=Alexander |abstract=A review of ''From Here To Eternity'' and ''The Naked and The Dead''. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr05hic}}
{{cquote|The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their personae or social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters in vacuo idealized by Revery. However conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable will likely break out of his pages.{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} }}
{{cquote|The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their personae or social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters in vacuo idealized by revery, and, However conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable will likely break out of his pages.{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} }}


{{cquote|The epic requires as its object the occurrence of an action, which must be expressed in the breadth of its circumstances and relations as a rich event connected with the total world of a nation and epoch.{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}} }}
{{cquote|The epic requires as its object the occurrence of an action, which must achieve expression in the whole breadth of its circumstance and relations as a rich event connected with the total world of a nation and epoch.{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}} }}


{{dc|dc=J|ames Jones was a born novelist}}, and Norman Mailer was a born writer. This distinction holds across the two authors’ life work. I illustrate this distinction here for only the authors’ first published novels, ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''From Here to Eternity''. However, these illustrations help assess the quality of these two books and each author’s career.{{pg|318|319}}
{{dc|dc=J|ames Jones was a born novelist}}. Norman Mailer was a born writer. This distinction holds, I believe, across the two authors’ life work. I illustrate this distinction here for only the authors’ first published novels, ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''From Here to Eternity''. However, I believe these illustrations help assess not only the quality of these two books and each author’s career.{{pg|318|319}}
==Two Types of Fiction==
==Two Types of Fiction==
===''From Here to Eternity''===
===''From Here to Eternity''===
Line 43: Line 43:
“Quiet, jerk,” Maggio said. “You want the CQ up here and break up the game?”
“Quiet, jerk,” Maggio said. “You want the CQ up here and break up the game?”


“To hell with the CQ,” Bloom said,in his customary loud vice. “And you too, you little Wop.”
“To hell with the CQ,” Bloom said, in his customary loud vice. “And you too, you little Wop.”


A transformation went over Maggio. He stood up and walked around the blanket, up to the huge Bloom who towered over him.
A transformation went over Maggio. He stood up and walked around the blanket, up to the huge Bloom who towered over him.
Line 78: Line 78:
“You really think so, mother?” her son said anxiously.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=858}}</blockquote>
“You really think so, mother?” her son said anxiously.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=858}}</blockquote>


The dramatic arch of the multi-stranded narrative is strong and clear. Prewitt’s refusal to box for the company, Maggio’s mounting resistance to the{{pg|322|323}} abuse of military power and class structures, and Warden’s bold consummation of his desire for Karen Holmes provide parallel disequilibria that trigger a narrative of beleaguered and in Prewitt and Maggio’s cases, doomed quests for “soljer” autonomy within a hierarchical social order. These three central narratives cascade outward, rippling across the others: Maggio’s rebellion is intensified by Prewitt’s ‘treatment’ by Holmes and the Company Boxers, and Maggio’s destruction in the Stockade deepens Prewitt’s rebelliousness. Ironic parallels between the Prewitt-Lorene affair and the Warden-Holmes affair cap the book’s conclusion aboard the liner on which Karen Holmes and ''Alma ‘Lorene’ Burke'' leave Honolulu shortly following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor and war provide a second parallel wave of disequilibria that concentrate the book’s action, speeding it to the conclusion: the AWOL Prewitt is shot by a Wartime sentry while seeking to return to his company, and the call of war cancels Warden’s committed involvement with Karen Holmes.
The dramatic arch of the multi-stranded narrative is strong and clear. Prewitt’s refusal to box for the company, Maggio’s mounting resistance to{{pg|322|323}} abuse of military power and class structures, and Warden’s bold consummation of his desire for Karen Holmes provide parallel disequilibria that trigger a narrative of beleaguered and in Prewitt and Maggio’s cases, doomed quests for “soljer” autonomy within a hierarchical social order. These three central narratives cascade outward, rippling across the others: Maggio’s rebellion is intensified by Prewitt’s ‘treatment’ by Holmes and the Company Boxers, and Maggio’s destruction in the Stockade deepens Prewitt’s rebelliousness. Ironic parallels between the Prewitt-Lorene affair and the Warden-Holmes affair cap the book’s conclusion aboard the liner on which Karen Holmes and ''Alma ‘Lorene’ Burke'' leave Honolulu shortly following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor and war provide a second parallel wave of disequilibria that concentrate the book’s action, speeding it to the conclusion: the AWOL Prewitt is shot by a Wartime sentry while seeking to return to his company, and the call of war cancels Warden’s committed involvement with Karen Holmes.


If there are jarring notes in ''Eternity'', they are stylistic. They are mainly comprised of faulty diction and idiosyncratic rhetoric that tends to arise when the writing veers off into an authorial voice distanced from specific characters and found within sociologically detailed dramatic situations. I address instances of the “bad” writing that has tended to conspire against the book’s chances for immortality, especially after eventually falling under the shadow of extensively negative reviews reviling Jones’s style that ''Some Came Running'' cast.
If there are jarring notes in ''Eternity'', they are stylistic. They are mainly comprised of faulty diction and idiosyncratic rhetoric that tends to arise when the writing veers off into an authorial voice distanced from specific characters and found within sociologically detailed dramatic situations. I address instances of the “bad” writing that has tended to conspire against the book’s chances for immortality, especially after eventually falling under the shadow of extensively negative reviews reviling Jones’s style that ''Some Came Running'' cast.
Line 123: Line 123:
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.”{{sfn|Jones|1951|pp=410-411}} This refers to fears that Prewitt thinks his unthinking candor precipitates in the minds of others (in this case fears of homosexuality in the mind of Maggio).
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.”{{sfn|Jones|1951|pp=410-411}} This refers to fears that Prewitt thinks his unthinking 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}}  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.
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 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, Garret 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|Garret|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).
In defense of Jones’s prose, Garret 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|Garret|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).
Retrieved from "https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F"