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

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 <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>