The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls: Difference between revisions

{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''For Whom the Bell Tolls''}}  

The contemporary negative attributes of nostalgia as mere sentimentality or as a tool to sell products hides its effectiveness as a legitimate way of addressing the past, particularly in literature. In other words, nostalgia does not have to be automatically linked to an unrealistic or fanciful yearning for a romanticized past. As Michael Janover explains, “Nostalgia is the pain of homesickness,” which could be turned into a positive as an author creates characters that have thoughts and feelings about their history. His interpretation of “nostalgias,” defined as “the pangs of longing for another time, another place, another self . . . almost certainly romantic in seed and, potentially, corrosively decadent in growth” can also be transformed into a useful device for creating literary figures.{{sfn|Janover|2000|p=115}}

Given that ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'' were published a mere eight years apart, the use of nostalgia within the narratives and as a literary technique speaks to the role of nostalgia in that era dominated by war, its consequences, and its immediate aftermath. As Sprengler notes, the interpretation of nostalgia had gone through a transformation in the early years of the twentieth century “within modernity because of industrialization, technological modernization and urbanization.”{{sfn|Sprengler|2009|p=16}} Leigh, for example, then views The Time Machine sections of Mailer’s novel as fixing the characters “unalterably to their environments . . . to a reality that is shown to be static and unchanging.”{{sfn|Leigh|1987|p=427}} Looking into the past, then, for some guidance or grounding within the current environment would provide solace for people going through tremendous change, whether it is for the authors, the characters they create, or for their readers.

There remains a fine line between an authentic representation of the past and a nostalgic view. For Hemingway and Mailer, the use of nostalgia in war novels certainly softens the harshness of the place their characters exist in the current time. As Charnes notes, “As physical creatures who are born, grow, age, and die, our experience of time convinces us that it moves in only one direction: forward. [But] As creatures with highly developed cognition and memory, however, our experience of time is vastly more complicated.”{{sfn|Charnes|2009|pp=74-75}} Breaking out of the chronological view also adds density to the narratives by revealing that time is a complex experience. For both Hemingway and Mailer, providing a multi-dimensional view of a character’s past that includes nostalgic impulses creates richer characters, ones that readers, in turn, empathize with as they struggle through the atrocities of warfare.

* {{cite news |last=Breit |first=Harvey |date={{date|June 3, 1951}} |title=Talk with Norman Mailer |url=https://static01.nyt.com/packages/html/books/mailer-talk1951.pdf |work=The New York Times |edition=late |location=7:20 |page= |access-date=2025-04-18 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Charnes |first=Linda |date=2009 |title=Anticipating Nostalgia: Finding Temporal Logic in a Textual Anomaly |journal=Textual Cultures: Text, Contexts, Interpretation |volume=4 |issue=1 |pages=72–83 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1940 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls. |location=New York |publisher=Scribner's |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Janover |first=Michael |date=2000 |chapter=Nostalgias |title=Critical Horizons 1.1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Leigh |first=Nigel |date=1987 |title=Spirit of Place in Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' | journal=Journal of American Studies |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=426–429 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead. ''New York: Rinehart and Company.  |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Solow |first=Michael |date=2009 |title=A Clash of Certainties, Old and New: ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' and the Inner War of Ernest Hemingway |journal=Journal of American Studies |volume=29 |issue=1 |pages=103–122 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Sprengler |first=Christine |date=2009 |title=Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film. |location=New York |publisher=Berghahn Books |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |author=<!--staff--> |date={{date|1948-05-10}} |title=War & No Peace. Rev. of ''The Naked and The Dead'', by Norman Mailer |url=https://normanmailer.us/war-no-peace-8ab28be074b2 |magazine=Time |pages= |access-date=2025-04-12 |ref={{SfnRef|War|1948}} }}