The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead: Premiere to Eternity?: Difference between revisions

{{MR05}}<!-- EDIT BELOW THIS LINE -->

{{dc|dc=J|ames Jones was a born novelist}}, and Norman Mailer was a born writer. This distinction holds across the two authors’ life work. I illustrate this distinction here for only the authors’ first published novels, ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''From Here to Eternity''. However, these illustrations help assess the quality of these two books and each author’s career.{{pg|318|319}}

In the classical taxonomic terms of Northrop Frye, From Here to Eternity is very much what Frye means by a ‘novel.’ Its characters do indeed wear “their personae or social masks.”{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} Robert E. Lee Prewitt is very much a Private First Class, Milton Anthony Warden a Sergeant, and Ms. Karen Holmes a housewife. (They are vivid and memorable, yet seldom capitalize much on eccentrics as Mark such well-remembered Dickens characters as ''David Copperfield’s'' Mr. Macawber or ''Martin Chuzzlewit’s'' Seth Pecksniff.) The book’s stable societal framework is the U.S. Army just preceding World War II. Right at ''Eternity’s'' outset, we are given the novelistic focus on a character in a social context:<blockquote>When he finished packing, he walked out onto the third-floor porch of the barracks, brushing the dust from his hands. He was a very neat and deceptively slim young man in summer khakis that were still fresh early in the morning.

 

Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them, without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them, by renouncing the place that they have given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>{{pg|319|320}}

Dramatic conflict arises with great naturalness and force from the well-etched milieu:

“To hell with the CQ,” Bloom said,in his customary loud vice. “And you too, you little Wop.”

In the terms set out by Frye on the novel and romance, Mailer is as much an author of romances as of novels. Many characteristic portions of Mailer’s fiction express the subjectivity of the “psychological archetype” and “[radiate] a glow of subjective intensity.”{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} This tendency in Mailer’s writing is perhaps most intensely expressed in the first-person narration of ''An American Dream’s'' Steve Rojack and  The Executioner’s Song’s polyphony of consciousnesses. (Song is perhaps more a socially wide-ranging chronicle of snatches of consciousness rather than action scenes.) Although ''Naked'' is hardly a romance, by the ascent of Mt. Anaka, Croft becomes a “psychological archetype” who “radiates a glow of subjective intensity.”{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} Indeed, with Croft, “something nihilistic and untamable” seems, in Frye’s words, “to keep break-{{pg|323|324}}ing out of [Mailer’s] pages” as would occur in much subsequent writing by Mailer.{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} However, a novelistic romancer, even as a fiction writer, will not suffice in Mailer. His work resonates not only as novel and romance but also as confession (close to the tenor of O’Shaughnessy’s tale) and anatomy or “Mannipean satire” (with Mailer himself in ''The Armies of the Night'' and with the Presidential contenders of Mailer’s presidential campaign chronicles).

Still, not even evocation of the full range of Frye’s four fictive modes will suffice to categorize much of Mailer’s work. In particular, The Naked and the Dead evokes Moretti’s reference to the appearance of literary “one-off cases, oddities, anomalies” in his discussion of that variant of the high modernist fiction he terms “the modern epic” in his 1996 ''The Modern Epic''. If the original epic can be boiled down rather conventionally into a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation, the “modern epic” is a variation of the epic in which the heroic is downplayed and the expression of the “total world of a nation and epoch” extends to the “supranational” sphere, in which we encounter a somewhat incongruous ungainly mix of modes of expression—not only the very novelistic accounts of exchanges among the tale’s principals but the confessional ardor of Ishmael’s voice when he accounts his high spirits, the cataloging of seamen’s conversation during watches, the lessons in cytology, the pseudo-Shakespearean soliloquies of Ahab along on the forecastle.{{sfn|Meyer|2005|p=2128}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}} With the Ahab-like ardor of Croft ascending Mt. Anaka, the social and linguistic cataloging of social types and vernaculars in Time Machine and Chow Line segments, and the epic qualities of the book’s framing and charting, and detailed depiction of the Anopopei campaign and its combat actions; and the fundamental novelistic interactions among the principals, each with members of his immediate sphere—Cummings, Hearn, and Croft, each with his circle of underlings—''The Naked and the Dead'' fits the template of the “modern epic” quite well.