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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{{byline|last=Hicks|first=Alexander |abstract=A review of ''From Here To Eternity'' and ''The Naked and The Dead''. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr05hic}}

==Two Types of Fiction==

===''From Here to Eternity''===

“Quiet, jerk,” Maggio said. “You want the CQ up here and break up the game?”

A transformation went over Maggio. He stood up and walked around the blanket, up to the huge Bloom who towered over him.

“You really think so, mother?” her son said anxiously.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=858}}</blockquote>

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.

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).

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).

''From Here to Eternity'' can only receive glancing blows from the criticisms of Jones’s writing for that book because these are largely irrelevant to most of the book’s writing. The same can be said for ''The Thin Red Line'' and ''Whistle''. ''Some Came Running'' may be another story. (For convenience, I ignore all of Jones’s books, but only the four that were mentioned.) On the one hand, the power of its underlying narrative, documentary scope and cogency, and rich characterization seems to compare to that of ''From Here to Eternity''. (Here we have aspects of Jones’s creativity perhaps even more effectively expressed by Minnelli’s 1958 film than by Zinnemann’s excellent 1953 one.) Moreover, Jones scholars have claimed with great zeal thematic and spiritual merits for the voluminous stretches of writing in ''Running'' that do not conform to the model of transparent writing and drama-like novelistic presentation described here for ''Running''. Alas, with ''Running'', critics of Jones’s style have a large target. Perhaps champions of Jones might devise defenses for his literary style—say via elaboration of Garret’s claim that what looks awkward about the style of ''Running'' has an unappreciated idiomatic grace. However, such a defense seems to me no more than sketched.{{pg|329|330}}

===''The Naked and the Dead''===  

Further, critics have tended to overlook the sheer propulsive vigor of ''Naked''’s narrative, which belies technical claims against this narrative’s construction.

In addition, Mailer’s prose sometimes attains a roiling power and dignity, most especially in its “overspirit” mode, using its use or near use of the “heroic” line: “Ahead, ahead, ahead, ahead, moving” catches the cadence of this pentameter, splendidly detailed for Mailer’s writings by Christopher Ricks. For example, “The moon was out, limning  the deck housings.”{{sfn|Ricks|2008|p=10}} Returning to Mailer on the movement of that 77mm artillery piece, we have a final phrase that begins with the heroic line:

Neither ''The Naked and the Dead'' nor ''From Here to Eternity'' is remarkable for such stylistic innovation or sustained eloquence as we find, say, in ''The Sun Also Rises'', ''The Sound and the Fury'', ''Invisible Man'', A''ugie Marsh'', or ''Pale Fire''. Each, however, is masterful in realizing its basic fictional design. ''From Here to Eternity'' dramatizes a social milieu unexcelled in American writing. ''The Naked and the Dead'' provides a vision of the U.S.A. combat in the Pacific theater of World War II and during the preceding decade, plus a look into the future. Stylistically, ''From Here to Eternity''  frequently attains the peculiar eloquence of great drama in which the audience witnesses intense action directly. ''The Naked and the Dead'' rises intermittently to a level of stylistic eloquence above and beyond the call of its particular fictional duty.

==Citations==

==Work Cited==

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* {{cite book |last=Burgess |first=Anthony |url= |title=99 Novels: The Best English Novels Since 1939 |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{refend}}