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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Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning | Hemingway and Mailer adopt a different structuring of their narratives involving the trauma of war. Instead of trying to use the traditional elements of narrative to engage the experience in a narrative, these authors use trauma to engage the structuring of the narrative. James Dawes asserts in The Language of War that “war thus initiates a semantic crisis, a crisis of meaning | ||
{{pg| 322 | 323}} | |||
premised upon disbelief in language’s ability effectively to refer to and intervene in the material world” (). Dawes’ assertion opens the exploratory vista regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative, for the experience of war not only illustrates a disbelief in language—as unit—in capturing the experience of trauma, but it also engages a disenchantment with the ability of narrative or story to refer to or intervene. Hemingway and Mailer adapt narrative and elements of the experience of trauma in a narrative calculus that both reflects and creates from trauma and the experience of trauma in order to address the effect of trauma on narrative presentations of the war. | |||
The notion underlying a narrative evolution to a more calculean movement occurring as a result of war trauma focuses on the effects of war trauma on narrative point of view—specifically on the objectivity and subjectivity—operating in their World War II narratives. Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that the trauma of war affects the understanding of narrative point of view profoundly in the structuring of war fiction. Stonebridge asserts that | |||
<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. ()</blockquote> | |||
In this movement, the traumas of war do not simply ravage the participants physically, but the individuals who experience war trauma are traumatized more deeply by the idea, echoing Stonebridge that “the trauma of the war” undoes their “deepest fantasies of themselves as peacetime masculine subjects” (). Stonebridge’s argument focuses on the notion—introduced and engaged in the burgeoning psychoanalytic community surrounding the world wars— that the traumas of war do not only affect the bodies of the | |||
{{pg| 323 | 324}} | |||
soldiers and individuals who experience the trauma of war, but that the traumas of war profoundly alter the epistemology and ontology of individuals. | |||
The undoing of the fantasy of subjectivity in relation to the experience of war trauma also relates to the evolution of (prior) narrative structures. The awareness that the trauma of war alters the understanding of subjectivity and objectivity and thus engages the necessary shifts that appear in the construction of narratives following the experience of trauma and war. Mailer’s narrative structure intimates this narrative shifting in both content and in construction in NAD. In one of the many “Time Machine” sections focusing on General Cummings, the narrative content and structure of the chapter reflects and creates from a narrative space of the undoing of subjectivity and objectivity as a result of the traumas of war. Mailer notes of Cummings that | |||
<blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote> | |||
In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the objective experience of trauma. | |||
In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and | |||