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

THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

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occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experiences of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s Chickamauga(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in The Legacy of the Civil War argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

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fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness. The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflecting an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.

Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) Death of a Hero and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) All Quiet on the Western Front attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,

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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.

War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) Tender is the Night and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) Mrs. Dalloway explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss. The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.

Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World

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World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war. The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).

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HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: TRAUMA’S TREATMENT IN PRESENTING WWII

Ernest Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees (1957) and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) illustrate necessary components and adaptations of the exploration of the narrative engagement of the traumas of war into and onto the structures of fiction. Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway’s ARIT projects an “atmosphere” that “was darkened by a strange psychological malaise, as if Ernest were using the pages of his novel as the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch” (477). While Baker—like many Hemingway scholars— is keen to link Hemingway’s second-to-last novel to the author’s personal experiences, Hemingway’s novel does not exist merely as an autobiographical account of trauma. Instead, Hemingway’s oftdismissed novel captures the sentiment of a culture affected by the trauma of war in the work’s evolved narrative structure. Baker is partially correct in his observations; however, the atmosphere of the novel is not merely darkened by Hemingway’s personal malaise, so much as the novel presents the dark malaise of a culture attempting to reconcile narratives that speak from the abject position of trauma.

Mailer’s NAD is the author’s first novel, and the reviews—unlike the reviews for Hemingway’s second-to-last-novel ARIT—refer to Mailer’s novel as successful at its attempt of providing commentary on the war; in fact, reviewers deemed it “the best novel yet about World War II.” Mailer’s work captures the experiences of war in a non-romantic fashion with its focus on the disunity surrounding the trauma of war in the structure of the narrative. The narrative disunity captured and implemented in the structure of both Mailer’s and Hemingway’s WW II novels involve a point of view that differs from the prior structures of war fiction. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American fiction—illustrated in ARIT and NAD—engages a different narrative point of view involving abjection and drawing on the trauma of war to generate a different structure of narrative.

The titles of the two works preface influence of trauma on the structure of the narratives. Mailer’s title calls attention to a shift in position in the structure of his narrative. "Naked" does not suggest the indicator of a physical objective state but, instead, projects an interior subjective state experienced abjectly during the trauma of war. Paul Seigel observes that the use of “naked” in Mailer’s title connects to a sense that the appearance of the term throughout the novel intimates a feeling of openness and vulnerability (294). For Seigel, the term showcases a central theme of

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the novel, the theme of the effects of drawing back into oneself after opening up to others. Seigel’s perspective on the use of “naked” is furthered if coupled with the idea that this receding of openness, of nakedness, occurs in the acts that lead to death in the structure of the narrative (). The coupling of the terms“naked”with “dead” produces a sense of unified disjuncture in conjunction to the work’s subject and structure. The narrative structure of the work reflects a sense of unified disjuncture in the jostling occurring between point of view perspective and structure operating in the novel. The jostling between exteriority and interiority is illustrated by the “time machine” passages.

Hemingway’s title selection also references a desire to explore the effects of war and trauma on the structure of the narrative. Hemingway’s paraphrase of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words, in the title of the ARIT, reflects on the question posed at the beginning of this piece: how does a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from an abject position of trauma? Civil War leader Stonewall Jackson, who upon death observes that, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” (Cooke ). Hemingway’s paraphrase of Jackson’s last words removes the communal “us” and the restorative “rest.” As such, Hemingway’s title highlights a different presentation of narrative subjectivity and objectivity from the intention suggested by Jackson on his deathbed: a representation of point of view that in Hemingway’s application does not involve traditional first or third person narrative structures. Instead, Hemingway’s narrative speaks not from the objective “you” or the subjective “I” but instead from a more abjective narrative perspective. Thus, Hemingway’s title intimates a focus on the giving of voice to a previously silenced experience and point of view of war and trauma inherent in not only the subject but, more important, in the structure of the novel.

Hemingway’s and Mailer’s titles suggests another tangent to the previous question of how a body of literature speaks from a position of trauma: why does a body of literature desire to speak from this previously-silenced abject position. Twentieth century war narratives differ from those following the Civil War. For Craig Warren, the constraints of the Victorian narrative structure in correspondence with codes of social propriety limit the earlier narratives that choose war and trauma as their subjects. The limitations of previous era’s narrative structures first appearing following the Civil War betray a silence—a narrative gap—that authors following the World Wars address as they attempt to generate stories of and from the dark tragedy and

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trauma of war. The narrative gap created through the silences in the narratives following war corresponds to the experience of trauma. In traditionally structured war narratives, subjectivity is bound to the experience of war, yet the experience of the trauma of war is often silenced below the surface of the narrative structure. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s World War II novels appear to grant a point of view to the previously silenced abject experience of trauma in their narratives as a palliative to the hegemonic subjectivity of prior war stories and structures.

Giving voice to trauma in the structure of literary narratives following World War I and II addresses the excising of the interior life of war trauma in predominant narratives. Evolving narrative structures operating in the late war fiction of Hemingway and the early fiction of Mailer counter a hegemonic privileging of the objective valor and subjective honor of war that systematically attempts to avoid engaging the abject experience of trauma in the narratives. John M. Kinder suggests that Norman Mailer’s goal in NAD is to

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.

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

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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

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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

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.

ARIT utilizes a narrative calculus as Hemingway shows how the experience of war and trauma affect the structure of the narrative as war similarly affects the participant. NAD engages a narrative calculus as Mailer, though the experience of war and trauma, engages and manipulates time, space, and

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