User:MerAtticus/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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~~{{user sandbox|plain=yes}}~~

{{dc|dc=P|AUL BOYER POINTS OUT THAT IN MOST OF THE MAJOR AMERICAN NOVELS }}of the

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confirmed.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=639}} Although the uncanny remains an often frustratingly

broad topic, mostly because it is a concept “whose entire denotation is a connotation,” most critics adhere to Freud’s definition of the uncanny

as something familiar made strange.{{sfn|Cixous|1976|p=528}}{{efn| Freud’s article on the uncanny remains a seminal text, but in recent years the uncanny’s boundlessness

as something familiar made strange.{{sfn|Cixous|1976|p=528}}{{efn|Freud’s article on the uncanny remains a seminal text, but in recent years the uncanny’s boundlessness

has seen it approached via the works of postmodern thinkers such as Jean-Francois Lyotard

and Jacques Derrida. For a discussion of the uncanny as a trope of deconstruction see

Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003). The uncanny has also become

Nicholas Royle, ''The Uncanny'' (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003). The uncanny has also become

a trope of postcolonialism; see Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New

a trope of postcolonialism; see Homi Bhabha, ''The Location of Culture'' (London and New

York: Routledge, 1994); and Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudliez (New

York: Routledge, 1994); and Julia Kristeva, ''Strangers to Ourselves'', trans. Leon S. Roudliez (New

York: Columbia UP, 1991); feminism; see Hélène Cixous, “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading

of Freud’s Das Unheimlich,” New Literary History 7.3 (Spring 1976); and psychoanalysis; see Ernst

of Freud’s ''Das Unheimlich'',” ''New Literary History 7.3'' (Spring 1976); and psychoanalysis; see Ernst

Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” trans. Roy Sellars, Angelaki 2.1 (1995); and Sigmund

Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” trans. Roy Sellars, ''Angelaki'' 2.1 (1995); and Sigmund

Freud, “The Uncanny,” trans. James Strachey, New Literary History 7.3 (Spring 1976). For

Freud, “The Uncanny,” trans. James Strachey, ''New Literary History'' 7.3 (Spring 1976). For

other significant studies of the uncanny see Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: 18th Century

other significant studies of the uncanny see Terry Castle, ''The Female Thermometer: 18th Century

Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford UP, 1995); Anthony Vidler, The Architectural

Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny'' (New York: Oxford UP, 1995); Anthony Vidler, ''The Architectural

Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1994); Hal Foster,

Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely'' (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1994); Hal Foster,

Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1993); Gordon Slethaug, The Play of the Double

''Compulsive Beauty'' (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1993); Gordon Slethaug, ''The Play of the Double

in Postmodern American Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993); and Paul Coates,

in Postmodern American Fiction'' (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993); and Paul Coates,

The Double and the Other (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998).}} Intellectual uncertainty

''The Double and the Other'' (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998).}} Intellectual uncertainty

regarding the animate nature of what is inanimate and vice versa (as provoked

by automatons or episodes of uncontrollable behavior), and the “return

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world.”{{sfn|Brians|1987|p=17}} Although the bomb provoked significant debate in the

newspapers of 1945, there was a silence in serious literature revealing both the

difficulty of representing mass death and how well that mass death was repressed.{{efn| `The first, and really only, in-depth writing on the atomic bomb by an American in the period

difficulty of representing mass death and how well that mass death was repressed.{{efn|`The first, and really only, in-depth writing on the atomic bomb by an American in the period

was John Hersey’s article “Hiroshima” published in The New Yorker in 1946, which relates the

was John Hersey’s article “Hiroshima” published in ''The New Yorker'' in 1946, which relates the

experiences of six Hiroshima residents on the day of the attack. Before Hersey’s piece, the majority

of discussions about the atomic bomb in the popular press focused on statistics of devastation

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victims, yet his dry journalistic tone struck some readers as oddly dispassionate. The effect of

Hersey’s approach, however journalistically appropriate, was to spare readers emotional engagement

with the bomb’s victims. One reader wrote to The New Yorker commending Hersey’s

with the bomb’s victims. One reader wrote to ''The New Yorker'' commending Hersey’s

~~480 • T H E M A I L E R R E V I E W~~

report for reasons the author might not have anticipated: “I read Hersey’s report. It was marvellous.

Now let us drop a handful on Moscow.” For an in-depth discussion of this topic, see

Joseph Luft and W.M.Wheeler, “Reaction to John Hersey’s Hiroshima,” Journal of Social Psychology

Joseph Luft and W.M.Wheeler, “Reaction to John Hersey’s ''Hiroshima'',” ''Journal of Social Psychology''

28 (Aug 1948): 135–40.}} Although nearly 100,00 feet of color film were filmed of Hiroshima

and Nagasaki by Air Force film crews following the bombings, the

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threatens the soldiers is annihilation by war and by language. Croft is convinced

with “passionate certainty” that Hennessey will die that very

day; when this does indeed occur, Croft becomes privy to “vistas of such omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it directly.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|pp=29, 40}} Red also {{pg|477|478}}

day; when this does indeed occur, Croft becomes privy to “vistas of such omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it directly.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|pp=29, 40}} Red also {{pg|477|478}}correctly predicts, or conjures, Hennessey’s death, and interprets it not as “large and devastating and meaningless” like the deaths of his other fallen comrades, but as a death which opens “a secret fear” because it seems “so ironic, so obvious, when he remembered the things Hennessey had said.” Red finds himself at the edge of a “bottomless dread” thinking about a death seemingly caused by his thoughts and Hennessey’s words.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=123}} When he remembers the moment he knew his friend would die, he experiences “a moment of awe and panic as if someone, ''something'', had been watching over their shoulder that night and laughing. There was a pattern where there shouldn’t be one.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=39}}

Death is the hidden secret that lies at the heart of the uncanny. Uncertainties

regarding what is animate or inanimate, real or unreal, self or

other, are uncanny not merely because of a discomforting blurring of

boundaries, but because these liminal areas evoke the nothingness of unbeing.

During Minetta’s stay in hospital, his proximity to damaged bodies

and corpses renders death “almost tangible.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=363}} Whereas death had once

been unreal, “the way a man’s face may sometimes seem unreal if he gazes

at it too long in the mirror”, Minetta is faced with death’s reality so

viscerally that he becomes “afraid to breathe, as if the air were polluted.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|pp=355, 363}} He wonders, “How do they expect a guy to stay here, after some poor

Joe died right next to you?”, a query reflecting not just the difficulty

of repressing knowledge of death while in close proximity to it, but which

also reveals a deeper fear regarding the menace posed to the living by the

dead. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=365}} When Gallagher receives news from America that his wife has died

during childbirth, although he keeps repeating to himself “[s]he’s dead,

she’s dead”, he is unable to really believe it. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=280}} As if in confirmation of

Gallagher’s sense of his wife’s continuing existence, the delays of the postal

system result in her letters continuing to arrive. Understandably unnerved

by these spectral communications, Gallagher is even more horrified by the

arrival of the final letter since it is the true harbinger of Mary’s death. Upon

taking it to the beach to read, Gallagher experiences a “jolt of horror”

ostensibly inspired by the strange reptilian sheen of the giant kelp but

which seems more likely to stem from his close encounter with death that

takes place beside it. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=284}} Gallagher controls his communion with the dead by

insisting that is it the kelp that frightens him rather than his experience of

a communication that seems to transcend the boundaries between the living and the dead.{{pg|478|479}}Mailer’s insistence on the soldiers’ dehumanization reflects acceptable postwar fears regarding conformity and corporatization, but also offers a critique of the processes through which violence to the human body is normalized during periods of war. Mailer’s over-elaboration of this motif registers as particularly uncanny. The repetition of mechanical descriptions renders description itself mechanical, sapping imagery of meaning and miring interpretation in a confusing space where familiar literary conventions have become strangely unfamiliar. The novel ends with yet another insistence on the unreality of war when the soldiers realize that “tomorrow the endless routine of harsh eventless days would begin once more.” The final disastrous patrol is “unfamiliar, unbelievable,” yet the bivouac before them is also “unreal.” Finally, Mailer suggests, “everything in the Army was unreal.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=709}} This constant reiteration regarding the unreality of war acts as a comment on psychological coping mechanisms during combat but it also reveals something of Mailer’s inability to cope with his material.

For any reader versed in the events of the war, never mentioned yet never

entirely banished from the novel is the fact that the conflict Mailer describes

will soon result in the detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and

Nagasaki. The bomb is nowhere in the text but resides in what might be thought of as the text’s unconscious; in the spaces created between a reader’s

knowledge and what the text depicts. Nagaoka Hiroyoshi defines atomic bomb literature as expressing the evil of the bomb and the survival of human

dignity (qtd. in Treat 20), a paradigm that obviously puts an American writer in an ambiguous position. Most American writers who did write about the

bomb in its immediate aftermath thus avoided its military application in favor of imagining its more benevolent role in a future utopia. Writers such

as Morris Ernst, whose 1955 book ''Utopia 1976'' promised a pleasing future of

atomic power, envisaged a world in which nuclear technology would provide

unlimited energy, control the weather, manufacture germ-free foods, provide

medical cures and revolutionize agricultural practice. Boyer argues that

utopian dreams of a new world of atomic energy were a way of avoiding the

unsettling reality of America’s use of atomic bombs to obliterate entire populations.{{sfn|Boyer|1985|p=122}} Such utopian dreams of the future “facilitated the process by which Americans absorbed Hiroshima and Nagasaki into their moral history.”{{sfn|Boyer|1985|p=124}}

Mailer’s reluctance to describe the deaths of the Japanese soldiers as real—resorting to imagery of dolls and insects to describe their corpses—is thus {{pg|479|480}}particularly revealing. Theme chanization of Mailer’s soldiers becomes even more relevant in this context, since the destruction and death meted out by the Second World War comes not from human hands but from technology. Although Mailer does his best to focus on the issues that concerned Cold War America by using the war as a fictional trope through which the country’s changing socio-political physiognomy can be examined, he cannot entirely avoid gesturing towards the abyss of total war and mass death. The dark secret hidden at the heart of mid-twentieth century life—the atomic bomb—stages an uncanny return through Mailer’s strangely mechanical soldiers, resulting in a novel that both avoids and highlights the terrifying inhumanity of World War II.

=== Notes ===

===Works Cited===

* {{cite journal |last=Bernstein |first=Susan |title=It Walks:The Ambulatory Uncanny |url= |journal=MLN |volume=118.5 |issue= |date=2003 |pages=111-40 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Boyer |first=Paul |date=1985 |title=By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age |url= |location=New York |publisher=Pantheon |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Brians |first=Paul |date=1987 |title=Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction 1895-1984 |url= |location=Kent, OH |publisher=Kent State UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Cixous |first=Hélène |title=Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s ''Das Unheimlich'' |url= |journal=New Literary History |volume=7.3 |issue= |date=9 May 1948 |pages=525-48 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Dempsey |first=David |date=9 May 1948 |title=The Dusty Answer of Modern War.” Rev. of ''The Naked and the Dead'', by Norman Mailer |url= |magazine=New York Times |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Ernst |first=Morris |date=1955 |title=Utopia 1976 |url= |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Company Inc. |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Filreis |first=Alan |title=Cultural Aspects of Atomic Anxiety |url= |journal=The Literature and Culture of the American 1950s. |volume= |issue= |date= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }

* {{cite book |last=Filreis |first=Alan |date=31 May 2007 |chapter=Cultural Aspects of Atomic Anxiety |title=The Literature and Culture of the American 1950s. |url= |location=University of Pennsylvania Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing |publisher=12 July 2009 |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Hal |title=Exquisite Corpses |url= |journal=Visual Anthropology Review |volume=7.1 |issue= |date=Spring 1976 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Freud |first=Sigmund |title=“The Uncanny.” Trans. James Strachey |url= |journal=New Literary History |volume=7.3 |issue= |date=Spring 1976 |pages=619-45 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Giedion |first=Siegfried |date=1948 |title=Mechanization Takes Command |url= |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Hersey |first=John |date=31 Aug 1946 |title=Hiroshima |url= |magazine=The New Yorker |pages=15-68 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Jentsch |first=Ernst |title=On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” Trans. Roy Sellars |url= |journal=Angelaki |volume=2.1 |issue= |date=1995 |pages=7-16 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=Peter G. |date=1976 |title=War and the Novelist: Appraising the AmericanWar Novel |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of Missouri P |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Micheal, ed. |date=1988 |title=Conversations with Norman Mailer |url= |location=Jackson |publisher=UP of Mississippi |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=Interview by Steven Marcus. “The Art of Fiction No. 32” |url= |journal=Paris Review |volume=31 |issue= |date=1964 |pages=1-37 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |title=Interview by Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch. “An Interview with Norman Mailer. Lennon |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages=39-51 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |title=Interview by Lyle Stuart.“An Intimate Interview with NormanMailer.” Lennon |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |title=Interview by Melvyn Bragg.“NormanMailer Talks toMelvyn Bragg about the Bizarre Business of Writing a Hypothetical Life of Marilyn Monroe.” Lennon |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages=193-206 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |title=Interview by Vincent Canby.“When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, It’s Norman Mailer.” Lennon |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages=139-44 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |url= |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Company Inc. |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Norris |first=Margot |date=2000 |title=Writing War in the Twentieth Century |url= |location=Charlottesville |publisher=U of Virginia P |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Treat |first=John Whittier |date=1995 |title=Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb |url= |location=Chicago |publisher=Chicago UP |pages= |ref=harv }}

===Citations===

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 {{user sandbox|plain=yes}}
-{{user sandbox|plain=yes}}
 {{dc|dc=P|AUL BOYER POINTS OUT THAT IN MOST OF THE MAJOR AMERICAN NOVELS }}of the
@@ Line 16: / Line 13: @@
 confirmed.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=639}} Although the uncanny remains an often frustratingly
 broad topic, mostly because it is a concept “whose entire denotation is a connotation,” most critics adhere to Freud’s definition of the uncanny
-as something familiar made strange.{{sfn|Cixous|1976|p=528}}{{efn| Freud’s article on the uncanny remains a seminal text, but in recent years the uncanny’s boundlessness
+as something familiar made strange.{{sfn|Cixous|1976|p=528}}{{efn|Freud’s article on the uncanny remains a seminal text, but in recent years the uncanny’s boundlessness
 has seen it approached via the works of postmodern thinkers such as Jean-Francois Lyotard
 and Jacques Derrida. For a discussion of the uncanny as a trope of deconstruction see
-Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003). The uncanny has also become
+Nicholas Royle, ''The Uncanny'' (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003). The uncanny has also become
-a trope of postcolonialism; see Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New
+a trope of postcolonialism; see Homi Bhabha, ''The Location of Culture'' (London and New
-York: Routledge, 1994); and Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudliez (New
+York: Routledge, 1994); and Julia Kristeva, ''Strangers to Ourselves'', trans. Leon S. Roudliez (New
 York: Columbia UP, 1991); feminism; see Hélène Cixous, “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading
-of Freud’s Das Unheimlich,” New Literary History 7.3 (Spring 1976); and psychoanalysis; see Ernst
+of Freud’s ''Das Unheimlich'',” ''New Literary History 7.3'' (Spring 1976); and psychoanalysis; see Ernst
-Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” trans. Roy Sellars, Angelaki 2.1 (1995); and Sigmund
+Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” trans. Roy Sellars, ''Angelaki'' 2.1 (1995); and Sigmund
-Freud, “The Uncanny,” trans. James Strachey, New Literary History 7.3 (Spring 1976). For
+Freud, “The Uncanny,” trans. James Strachey, ''New Literary History'' 7.3 (Spring 1976). For
-other significant studies of the uncanny see Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: 18th Century
+other significant studies of the uncanny see Terry Castle, ''The Female Thermometer: 18th Century
-Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford UP, 1995); Anthony Vidler, The Architectural
+Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny'' (New York: Oxford UP, 1995); Anthony Vidler, ''The Architectural
-Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1994); Hal Foster,
+Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely'' (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1994); Hal Foster,
-Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1993); Gordon Slethaug, The Play of the Double
+''Compulsive Beauty'' (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1993); Gordon Slethaug, ''The Play of the Double
-in Postmodern American Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993); and Paul Coates,
+in Postmodern American Fiction'' (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993); and Paul Coates,
-The Double and the Other (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998).}} Intellectual uncertainty
+''The Double and the Other'' (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998).}} Intellectual uncertainty
 regarding the animate nature of what is inanimate and vice versa (as provoked
 by automatons or episodes of uncontrollable behavior), and the “return
@@ Line 48: / Line 45: @@
 world.”{{sfn|Brians|1987|p=17}} Although the bomb provoked significant debate in the
 newspapers of 1945, there was a silence in serious literature revealing both the
-difficulty of representing mass death and how well that mass death was repressed.{{efn| `The first, and really only, in-depth writing on the atomic bomb by an American in the period
+difficulty of representing mass death and how well that mass death was repressed.{{efn|`The first, and really only, in-depth writing on the atomic bomb by an American in the period
-was John Hersey’s article “Hiroshima” published in The New Yorker in 1946, which relates the
+was John Hersey’s article “Hiroshima” published in ''The New Yorker'' in 1946, which relates the
 experiences of six Hiroshima residents on the day of the attack. Before Hersey’s piece, the majority
 of discussions about the atomic bomb in the popular press focused on statistics of devastation
@@ Line 56: / Line 53: @@
 victims, yet his dry journalistic tone struck some readers as oddly dispassionate. The effect of
 Hersey’s approach, however journalistically appropriate, was to spare readers emotional engagement
-with the bomb’s victims. One reader wrote to The New Yorker commending Hersey’s
+with the bomb’s victims. One reader wrote to ''The New Yorker'' commending Hersey’s
-• T H E M A I L E R R E V I E W
 report for reasons the author might not have anticipated: “I read Hersey’s report. It was marvellous.
 Now let us drop a handful on Moscow.” For an in-depth discussion of this topic, see
-Joseph Luft and W.M.Wheeler, “Reaction to John Hersey’s Hiroshima,” Journal of Social Psychology
+Joseph Luft and W.M.Wheeler, “Reaction to John Hersey’s ''Hiroshima'',” ''Journal of Social Psychology''
 (Aug 1948): 135–40.}} Although nearly 100,00 feet of color film were filmed of Hiroshima
 and Nagasaki by Air Force film crews following the bombings, the
@@ Line 202: / Line 198: @@
 threatens the soldiers is annihilation by war and by language. Croft is convinced
 with “passionate certainty” that Hennessey will die that very
-day; when this does indeed occur, Croft becomes privy to “vistas of such omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it directly.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|pp=29, 40}}  Red also {{pg|477|478}}
+day; when this does indeed occur, Croft becomes privy to “vistas of such omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it directly.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|pp=29, 40}}  Red also {{pg|477|478}}correctly predicts, or conjures, Hennessey’s death, and interprets it not as “large and devastating and meaningless” like the deaths of his other fallen comrades, but as a death which opens “a secret fear” because it seems “so ironic, so obvious, when he remembered the things Hennessey had said.” Red finds himself at the edge of a “bottomless dread” thinking about a death seemingly caused by his thoughts and Hennessey’s words.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=123}} When he remembers the moment he knew his friend would die, he experiences “a moment of awe and panic as if someone, ''something'', had been watching over their shoulder that night and laughing. There was a pattern where there shouldn’t be one.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=39}}
+Death is the hidden secret that lies at the heart of the uncanny. Uncertainties
+regarding what is animate or inanimate, real or unreal, self or
+other, are uncanny not merely because of a discomforting blurring of
+boundaries, but because these liminal areas evoke the nothingness of unbeing.
+During Minetta’s stay in hospital, his proximity to damaged bodies
+and corpses renders death “almost tangible.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=363}} Whereas death had once
+been unreal, “the way a man’s face may sometimes seem unreal if he gazes
+at it too long in the mirror”, Minetta is faced with death’s reality so
+viscerally that he becomes “afraid to breathe, as if the air were polluted.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|pp=355, 363}}  He wonders, “How do they expect a guy to stay here, after some poor
+Joe died right next to you?”, a query reflecting not just the difficulty
+of repressing knowledge of death while in close proximity to it, but which
+also reveals a deeper fear regarding the menace posed to the living by the
+dead. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=365}} When Gallagher receives news from America that his wife has died
+during childbirth, although he keeps repeating to himself “[s]he’s dead,
+she’s dead”, he is unable to really believe it. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=280}} As if in confirmation of
+Gallagher’s sense of his wife’s continuing existence, the delays of the postal
+system result in her letters continuing to arrive. Understandably unnerved
+by these spectral communications, Gallagher is even more horrified by the
+arrival of the final letter since it is the true harbinger of Mary’s death. Upon
+taking it to the beach to read, Gallagher experiences a “jolt of horror”
+ostensibly inspired by the strange reptilian sheen of the giant kelp but
+which seems more likely to stem from his close encounter with death that
+takes place beside it. {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=284}} Gallagher controls his communion with the dead by
+insisting that is it the kelp that frightens him rather than his experience of
+a communication that seems to transcend the boundaries between the living and the dead.{{pg|478|479}}Mailer’s insistence on the soldiers’ dehumanization reflects acceptable postwar fears regarding conformity and corporatization, but also offers a critique of the processes through which violence to the human body is normalized during periods of war. Mailer’s over-elaboration of this motif registers as particularly uncanny. The repetition of mechanical descriptions renders description itself mechanical, sapping imagery of meaning and miring interpretation in a confusing space where familiar literary conventions have become strangely unfamiliar. The novel ends with yet another insistence on the unreality of war when the soldiers realize that “tomorrow the endless routine of harsh eventless days would begin once more.” The final disastrous patrol is “unfamiliar, unbelievable,” yet the bivouac before them is also “unreal.” Finally, Mailer suggests, “everything in the Army was unreal.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=709}} This constant reiteration regarding the unreality of war acts as a comment on psychological coping mechanisms during combat but it also reveals something of Mailer’s inability to cope with his material.
+For any reader versed in the events of the war, never mentioned yet never
+entirely banished from the novel is the fact that the conflict Mailer describes
+will soon result in the detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and
+Nagasaki. The bomb is nowhere in the text but resides in what might be thought of as the text’s unconscious; in the spaces created between a reader’s
+knowledge and what the text depicts. Nagaoka Hiroyoshi defines atomic bomb literature as expressing the evil of the bomb and the survival of human
+dignity (qtd. in Treat 20), a paradigm that obviously puts an American writer in an ambiguous position. Most American writers who did write about the
+bomb in its immediate aftermath thus avoided its military application in favor of imagining its more benevolent role in a future utopia. Writers such
+as Morris Ernst, whose 1955 book ''Utopia 1976'' promised a pleasing future of
+atomic power, envisaged a world in which nuclear technology would provide
+unlimited energy, control the weather, manufacture germ-free foods, provide
+medical cures and revolutionize agricultural practice. Boyer argues that
+utopian dreams of a new world of atomic energy were a way of avoiding the
+unsettling reality of America’s use of atomic bombs to obliterate entire populations.{{sfn|Boyer|1985|p=122}}  Such utopian dreams of the future “facilitated the process by which Americans absorbed Hiroshima and Nagasaki into their moral history.”{{sfn|Boyer|1985|p=124}}
+Mailer’s reluctance to describe the deaths of the Japanese soldiers as real—resorting to imagery of dolls and insects to describe their corpses—is thus {{pg|479|480}}particularly revealing. Theme chanization of Mailer’s soldiers becomes even more relevant in this context, since the destruction and death meted out by the Second World War comes not from human hands but from technology. Although Mailer does his best to focus on the issues that concerned Cold War America by using the war as a fictional trope through which the country’s changing socio-political physiognomy can be examined, he cannot entirely avoid gesturing towards the abyss of total war and mass death. The dark secret hidden at the heart of mid-twentieth century life—the atomic bomb—stages an uncanny return through Mailer’s strangely mechanical soldiers, resulting in a novel that both avoids and highlights the terrifying inhumanity of World War II.
+=== Notes ===
+{{notelist}}
+===Works Cited===
+{{Refbegin}}
+* {{cite journal |last=Bernstein |first=Susan |title=It Walks:The Ambulatory Uncanny |url= |journal=MLN |volume=118.5 |issue= |date=2003 |pages=111-40 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Boyer |first=Paul |date=1985 |title=By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age |url= |location=New York |publisher=Pantheon |pages= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Brians |first=Paul |date=1987 |title=Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction 1895-1984 |url= |location=Kent, OH |publisher=Kent State UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite journal |last=Cixous |first=Hélène |title=Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s ''Das Unheimlich'' |url= |journal=New Literary History |volume=7.3 |issue= |date=9 May 1948 |pages=525-48 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite magazine |last=Dempsey |first=David |date=9 May 1948 |title=The Dusty Answer of Modern War.” Rev. of ''The Naked and the Dead'', by Norman Mailer |url= |magazine=New York Times |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Ernst |first=Morris |date=1955 |title=Utopia 1976 |url= |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Company Inc. |pages= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite journal |last=Filreis |first=Alan |title=Cultural Aspects of Atomic Anxiety |url= |journal=The Literature and Culture of the American 1950s. |volume= |issue= |date= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }
+* {{cite book |last=Filreis |first=Alan |date=31 May 2007 |chapter=Cultural Aspects of Atomic Anxiety |title=The Literature and Culture of the American 1950s. |url= |location=University of Pennsylvania Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing |publisher=12 July 2009 |pages= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Hal |title=Exquisite Corpses |url= |journal=Visual Anthropology Review |volume=7.1 |issue= |date=Spring 1976 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite journal |last=Freud |first=Sigmund |title=“The Uncanny.” Trans. James Strachey |url= |journal=New Literary History |volume=7.3 |issue= |date=Spring 1976 |pages=619-45 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Giedion |first=Siegfried |date=1948 |title=Mechanization Takes Command |url= |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite magazine |last=Hersey |first=John |date=31 Aug 1946 |title=Hiroshima |url= |magazine=The New Yorker |pages=15-68 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite journal |last=Jentsch |first=Ernst |title=On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” Trans. Roy Sellars |url= |journal=Angelaki |volume=2.1 |issue= |date=1995 |pages=7-16 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=Peter G. |date=1976 |title=War and the Novelist: Appraising the AmericanWar Novel |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of Missouri P |pages= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Micheal, ed. |date=1988 |title=Conversations with Norman Mailer |url= |location=Jackson |publisher=UP of Mississippi |pages= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=Interview by Steven Marcus. “The Art of Fiction No. 32” |url= |journal=Paris Review |volume=31 |issue= |date=1964 |pages=1-37 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |title=Interview by Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch. “An Interview with Norman Mailer. Lennon |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages=39-51 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |title=Interview by Lyle Stuart.“An Intimate Interview with NormanMailer.” Lennon |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |title=Interview by Melvyn Bragg.“NormanMailer Talks toMelvyn Bragg about the Bizarre Business of Writing a Hypothetical Life of Marilyn Monroe.” Lennon |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages=193-206 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |title=Interview by Vincent Canby.“When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, It’s Norman Mailer.” Lennon |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages=139-44 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |url= |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Company Inc. |pages= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Norris |first=Margot |date=2000 |title=Writing War in the Twentieth Century |url= |location=Charlottesville |publisher=U of Virginia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Treat |first=John Whittier |date=1995 |title=Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb |url= |location=Chicago |publisher=Chicago UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
+{{Refend}}
+===Citations===
+{{Reflist}}
+{{review}}