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: Difference between revisions

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.

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.

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.

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

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  

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,

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

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.

<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>

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.

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>