The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer/1. The Naked and the Dead: Difference between revisions

In “The White Negro,” Mailer writes:

''The Naked and the Dead'', drawing its subject matter di­rectly from that war, proceeds on the two levels of con­cern suggested by the quotation: the sickness of society and the flawed nature of the individual which engenders and perpetuates that sickness. Mailer’s vision of American society as it is represented in the American army is one of abject pessimism. In conjunction with his treatment of individual soldiers and officers it more closely approaches despair than any novel he has written since.

The first of these limitations is that of subject matter. It was natural that a recent veteran should write of the war, and particularly of the Pacific theatre, in which he had served. But it would seem that the choice of this area over the European conflict represented to Mailer a greater decision than is immediately apparent. In ''Advertisements for Myself'', speaking of the short novel “A Calculus at Heaven,” which is the obvious precursor of ''The Naked and the Dead'', he says:

So if a year later, in this short novel, I chose to write about the Pacific war, it was not because I was in love with the tropics but because . . . it was and is easier to write a war novel about the Pacific—you don't have to have a feeling about the culture of Europe and the collision of America upon it. To try a major novel about the last war in Europe without a sense of the past is to fail in the worst way—as an overambitious and opportunistic slick.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=28}} }}

Certain obvious parallels may be drawn, here, between several of Mailer’s characters and those of writers he had read and admired at Harvard. In ''Advertisements for Myself'', he tells us that:

The influence of Farrell may be seen in Gallagher, the Irishman from the Boston slums, who has many super­ficial similarities to Studs Lanigan. But while Gallagher, like Lanigan, is represented as a mass of inarticulate frustrations and hatreds, and while Mailer, like Farrell, deals in a sort of economic determinism which lays much of the blame at the feet of society, the emphasis has shifted drastically. From Farrell, Mailer has inherited and accepted the doctrine that poverty and ignorance and local political corruption are self-perpetuating, and that they are destructive to the common man caught up in them. But where Studs is a sympathetic character, and ultimately one of some stature, Gallagher can evoke in us little more than a grudging pity. Certainly neither is a man of particular morality. The childhood Jew-baiting scenes in Farrell’s trilogy are, if anything, more brutal than the parallel scene in the Gallagher flashback, for example. What mitigates reader sympathy for Gallagher, and throws some blame upon the individual as well as society for the hatred and brutality which make up Gallagher’s world vision, is the man’s own self-indulgent, aggressive stupidity. Further, he is portrayed with no saving virtues. Unlike such men as Croft, Martinez or Goldstein, who for widely different and often selfish reasons act with courage or perseverence to the ultimate good of their immediate society, the pla­toon, Gallagher is craven in his hatred. It would seem to be one of Mailer’s theses that no matter what the environ­ment, only a particular type of man responds entirely to the corrupt manipulation of machine politics and pro­fessional bigots.

Such an intention on Mailer’s part seems substantiated by General Cummings’ confident prophecy that the world, and America in particular, is destined to undergo a long era in which the reactionaries will reign. But what crushes all hope for liberal ascendancy in American politics is Mailer’s view of the common man. Mailer’s enlisted men are not idealized representatives of the lower classes who make up the basis of Steinbeck’s optimism for America. Nor are they the carefully documented representatives of diverse ethnic groups who are brought together in such war novels as Leon Uris’ ''Battle Cry'' to point up with a maudlin, neo-Crane pride the brotherhood of men under fire. Rather, with as intense a liberal leaning as Steinbeck and as vivid a feeling for the realities of combat as any ex-riflemen writing, Mailer establishes a gallery of men in whose reality the reader believes, and destroys them all, leaving a message of despair. Lieutenant Hearn, the self­-styled liberal, is killed by direct pressure of the hatred of the lower classes as it reposes in Croft, but not before he has recognized in himself a corresponding disgust for the men; and, more disturbing, a desire for power parallel to that of General Cummings. Both Hearn and Cummings make up part of Mailer’s comprehensive despair at the plight of the individual. Not only is Hearn destroyed, but even Cummings, who survives and wins the campaign, recognizes personal failure at the novel’s end:

Time was going by, and with it, opportunity. . . . He was getting older, and he would be bypassed. When the war with Russia came he would not be important enough, not close enough to the seats of power, to take the big step, the big leap. Perhaps after this war he might be smarter to take a fling at the State Department. His brother-in-law certainly would do him no harm.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=556}} }}

Of all the characters, Martinez is perhaps the most obviously and understandably neurotic, and the most sym­pathetically presented. A product of the Mexican slums in Texas, Martinez is an outsider who desperately wants acceptance. Existing on the periphery of a white man’s society, he has received less from America than any other man in the platoon. Yet, ironically, it is he who gives most of himself, in his yearning after the American dream. Throughout his youth, Martinez has accepted his inferior position with external passivity, with the result that he has become a mass of insecurities. The slightest hint of acceptance melts him, while the smallest rejection throws him into a panic. In Australia, British subjects can always get a shilling or two from him by calling him Yank, a name which embarrasses and thrills him. When Brown casually refers to him as a Texan, he is proud and fearful:

Martinez is a very frightened and yet a very brave man. After his menial assignments as houseboy to officers in the peacetime army, he has been presented with the oppor­tunity, as he sees it, to gain recognition and acceptance through courage and competence. He is the scout of the platoon, constantly exposed to greater danger than anyone else, and he does his job well, with a fierce pride in his ability, and in the sergeant’s stripes it has earned him. The price he has paid for this pittance of recognition is exorbitant. His nerves are shattered. Any loud noise frightens him, he cannot sleep or eat normally, and it is only with a sheer effort of will that he continues to function. But he is so committed to what he sees as his one path to success, and to the paradoxical loyalty he feels to a country that has treated him so shabbily, that he continues to seek out dangerous assignments:

Martinez lives by a code of desperate courage, and it has almost destroyed him. Yet he is by no means a totally ad­mirable character. Not only are his motives held up as neurotic and his achievements viewed as foolish and ironi­cal in light of the country in whose name he does them, but his ambitions are nebulous and shoddy. He is a sen­sitive man, but not an intelligent one, and his vague no­tions of success revolve about a vision of sexual vindictive­ness. The ''time machine'' episode dealing with Martinez juxtaposes with enormous irony the passive exterior and the submerged, vindictive yearnings within him, as well as the futility of his efforts to satisfy himself:

Julio, will you do a good job on my boots today?

Each man is linked to several of the others by par­ticular complementary needs or shared assumptions, but these are very tenuous and each man is ultimately isolated. Certain of these temporary liaisons are of particular in­terest. One obvious parallel exists between Martinez and the two Jews, Roth and Goldstein, as members of minority groups. The parallel is, in fact, a superficial one, although the vivid portrayal of particular instances of racial preju­dice both on Anopopei and in the ''time machine'' sequence is not the least of Mailer’s thrusts at American values. Not only is Martinez separated from the Jews by a complete absence of shared assumptions and values, but Goldstein and Roth are almost as far apart from each other. The conversation between Goldstein and Martinez about America is rife with irony, because the two men think they are communicating, when they really are not. While Gold­stein rambles on about the typical bourgeois ambitions of New York Jewry, Martinez translates these in terms of his own experience. When Goldstein talks of his plans to open a small shop of his own and move to a suburb, Martinez thinks hungrily of his childhood memory of a rich brothel­ keeper flashing a roll of bills. Yet while each pursues his separate visions, the two men are alike in their ingenuous acceptance of the American dream. Goldstein remarks:

Martinez nodded. He wondered how big a room a very rich man needed to hold his money. Images of rich clothing, of shoeshines and hand-painted ties, a succession of tall blonde women with hard cold grace and brittle charm languished in his head. “A rich man do anything he damn well feel like it,” Martinez said with admiration.

The conversation helps also to characterize Goldstein, a man like a puppy dog:

Yet he never became completely disheartened. Essentially he was an active man, a positive man. If his feelings were bruised, if another friend had proved himself undependable, Goldstein would nurse his pains, but almost always he would recover and sally out again.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=349}} }}

Roth is proud that his parents were “modern,” and scornfully sees Goldstein as “an old grandfather full of mutterings and curses, certain he would die a violent death.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=44}} The observation is well taken, for Goldstein does come from the pain-sodden, orthodox background. It is Goldstein’s grandfather, in fact, who in the ''time machine'' sequence presents the most valid definition of what a Jew is. Mumbling half to himself, half to the boy Goldstein, the grandfather, lost in the mazes of archaic and useless Talmudic lore, makes an important statement:

Why?

Important to both Croft’s and Red’s uncomfortable intuitions about fate is the death of an otherwise minor character, Hennessey. In the first chapter, crammed as it is with a rather clumsy exposition of a number of charac­ters, Croft is established as a man who rides the tide of fate:

Therefore, Croft’s prophecy about the cautious Hennessey is invested with a portentous effect:

And then with a passionate certainty he thought, “Hennessey’s going to get killed today.” He felt like laughing to release the ferment in him. This time he was sure.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=27}} }}

Although the intuition is immediately undercut in Croft’s mind by his recognition that such premonitions have not always proved correct, it is nonetheless invested with some significance:

Red, in his initial appearance, is characterized in juxtaposition to Hennessey. Standing alone on deck the night before the assault, Red thinks mockingly of Hen­nessey’s concern, on another occasion, with his life belt. Hennessey’s stated ethic is to be prepared:

Red, on the other hand, is characterized by an isolated fatalism, and by a series of negations and rejections:

He wanted none of it. He’d do no man harm if he could help it, and he’d take no crap. He never had, he told himself proudly.

When Hennessey does become the platoon’s first casualty, because of his own frenetic attempts to move from a relatively secure position to one he feels will be safer, the reactions of Croft and Red are dramatically different. Red fearfully senses the presence of some malig­nant governing force:

But Croft is seized by an overwhelming sense of power, in this reaffirmation of his own infallibility:

Hennessey’s death has several other reverberations of lesser import, later in the novel. Gallagher, wandering on the beach with his dead wife’s last letter in his pocket unopened, thinks hazily of Hennessey and of death in general. When, some time after Hennessey’s death, mail arrives for him, it becomes the subject, for Mailer, not of poignance, but of a contemptuous irony directed at the superficiality of other men’s sympathy:

“I don’t know, name’s familiar.” The assistant thought a moment and then said, “Wait a minute, I remember, he was knocked off the day we came in.” The assistant was pleased that he had recalled it when the mail clerk had forgotten.

In the landing craft, immediately before they begin their march, the men have a clear view of Anaka:

If Gallagher, easily one of the most insensitive men in the platoon, reacts in this way, it is clear that the distant effect of the mountain is breathtaking. The perversion of this aesthetic appearance to one of unmitigated horror, and the metamorphosis of the men into plodding, cringing animals in the course of their battle with the mountain, are rendered more powerful by the initial view of Anaka. More central to Mailer’s final statement on the position of the individual in the universal scheme are the reactions of Red and Croft, whose entirely different personal defeats will most clearly define the view of the human condition posited by the novel:

And Red felt only gloom, and a vague harass­ment. Croft’s words bothered him subtly. He ex­amined the mountain with little emotion, almost in­ difference. But when he looked away he was bothered by the fear all of the men in the platoon had felt at one time or another that day. Like the others, Red was wondering if this patrol would be the one where his luck ran out.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|pp=348—349}} }}

Hearn’s death is no accident, and it is more than circumstance which makes Martinez the instrument by which Croft effects it. After the encounter with the enemy in which Wilson is fatally wounded, Hearn wrestles with his own conscience, and comes to the conclusion that no matter how much he is personally driven to succeed in the mission (as a sort of inverted defiance toward Cum­mings) the responsible thing to do is to turn back. It is night, and in order to insure that he will obey his own decision in the morning, Hearn confides it to Croft. The latter persuades the Lieutenant to send a scout ahead, and to base the decision to continue or turn back on whether the enemy is present. Armed with Hearn’s permission, the Sergeant delegates Martinez for the patrol, and admonishes him to report his findings only to Croft himself. Martinez does come upon a body of Japanese soldiers, and the manner in which the confrontation is rendered is fraught with philosophical overtones. With all of his skills of stealth heightened by his terror, “functioning more like an animal now than a man,”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=456}} Martinez slips through the Japanese camp. The climax of the sequence comes when the terrified scout comes upon an enemy guard who, though unaware of his presence, poses an insurmountable threat. Martinez can neither retreat nor advance unless he kills the guard, and for a moment he cannot act:

He does, of course, kill the guard, skillfully and silently, with his trench knife. But the quality of his hesitation as Mailer renders it is significant. Even in Martinez’ inarticu­late reason, the primal basis of humanity holds a last, momentary outpost. But it is a feeble bastion, and reason has no place in war. Insofar as Martinez and the guard are men, they are men irrevocably isolated by the hostility and distrust inherent in the human condition. And they are, in fact, barely human except in the negative aspects of humanity. They are conceived more as animals. Mailer has already described Martinez as functioning as an animal and in the very act of murder for survival:

Life and death have become merely indisputable facts, physical laws robbed of all moral significance. In a very real sense, Martinez has been thoroughly brutalized. The fact that later in the novel he regains enough sensitivity to feel guilt makes the juxtaposition of human mind and animal instinct the more horrible, for man is robbed of the amoral, guiltless instinct of the predator and the moral choice of the human being, alike.

Affected, as are all the men, by Roth’s death, and suspicious of the truth about Hearn’s, Red is further beaten down by the treachery of his own body. He is past thirty and his kidneys are sick, his appetite gone, his exhaustion complete. On one of the necessarily more frequent rest breaks, he senses his defeat:

In one last attempt to assert himself, he openly refuses Croft’s order to move on. Croft levels his rifle at Red, and though the other men mutter in agreement with Red, none has the courage to act. Red, unarmed, faces the rifle for tense moments, but Croft’s trump card is his demon­ strated willingness to kill in cold blood, and no other man present is equal to it:

Suddenly he knew exactly what had happened to Hearn, and the knowledge left him weak. Croft was going to shoot. He knew it.

Croft’s immediate reaction after subduing the mutiny is a renewal of confidence in himself. But it lasts only briefly. The common man, no matter how fierce his pride, is no match for the pressures of society and of a natural universe that is indifferent but crushing in its insurmount­able, massive passivity. At the same time, as Cummings has finally learned by the end of the novel, the sheer weight of sullen resistance generated by the mass of men will wear out the energy of any leader. Croft is doomed to fail because of this resistance, despite the fact that he has overcome its most overt expression in Red:

There was another strain. The closer he came to the crest of the mountain the greater became his anxiety. Each new turn of the staircase demanded an excessive effort of will from him. He had been driving nearer and nearer the heart of this country for days, and it had a cumulative terror. All the vast alien stretches of land they had crossed had eroded his will, pitched him a little finer. It was an effort, almost palpable, to keep advancing over strange hills and up the flanks of an ancient resisting mountain.

Croft, Cummings and Red have all learned in differ­ent ways that one man alone cannot overcome the resistance of nature and other men, cannot even remain passively aloof and independent. Hearn, who counted more than any other character upon the common man as a positive force capable of constructive organization, has been be­trayed and destroyed because both the common man and those who manipulate him resented and feared his beliefs. And when Red, searching for a new philosophy to replace the one he has lost, explores in a primitive way the very ideals Hearn represented, he finds . . . nothing:

He had to depend on other men, he needed other men now, and he didn’t know how to go about it. Deep within him were the first nebulae of an idea, but he could not phrase it. If they all stuck to­gether. . . .

Ultimately, then, men cannot help one another. But can one man, unhindered by others and driven by a fierce enough determination, be a match for a non-human foe? The ultimate denial of even this possibility rests with, of all people, Croft:

• • •

This final implicit statement on the ascendancy of reactionary mediocrity in postwar America, in conjunc­tion with the preoccupation in ''The Naked and the Dead'' with the theme of the shabbiness of the American dream, shows Mailer to be very much a social critic. The obvious and self-admitted influences upon his work of Farrell, Steinbeck and Dos Passos place him at the beginning of his career within the literary continuum established by the social novels of the thirties. In the two decades follow­ing publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'', Mailer was to move progressively further from the use of obviously derivative elements in his fiction; but he was to remain consistently critical of the ills of American society. Symp­tomatic of his proximity to immediately contemporary issues, and of his impending break from the direct influ­ence of other writers, is Mailer’s rejection of the concep­tion of the common man held by the social writers of the Depression, in favor of a sophisticated and pessimistic vision of the human condition which is decidedly charac­teristic of postwar literary values. Yet it is this very element of concern with a more contemporary problem which draws vitriolic criticism of ''The Naked and the Dead'' from at least one critic writing as late as 1960. Daniel Spice­handler, in his dissertation, “The American War Novel,” concludes his otherwise perceptive short treatment of Mailer’s book with this condemnation:

These charges, cloaked in an obvious subjectivity, stem from Mailer’s failure to subscribe to the particular form of “protest” which Spicehandler feels is necessary to the validity of a war novel. Yet it is in the very terms of this condemnation that Mailer’s particular achievement in ''The Naked and the Dead'' may be finally defined. It is my contention that Mailer learned from war something that no earlier war had so clearly taught: the futility of the human condition. War for Mailer is more than a subject for fiction in itself: it is a concrete representation of human weakness and of the society created by such weak­ness. If the protest in this novel were limited, as Spice­handler seems to suggest, only to a condemnation of the American social structure, it would be understandable, for Mailer’s world is indeed “a world stripped of hope.” Within this hopelessness, however, is the germ of a protest. Mailer’s fiction is always, even at this point, about “man who, in the final analysis, seeks redemption and who desires to endure against all forces. . . .” In ''The Naked and the Dead'' redemption is impossible (except on the very limited level of the passive Goldstein and Ridges), and even the endurance of such a man as Red, defined as it is solely in terms of negatives, must crumble. Mailer saw the plight of the individual in the postwar years primarily in negative terms, but this does not mean that he was willing to give up entirely on man’s chances for redemption, and to rest on the black vision of ''The Naked and the Dead'' as his final statement. Other novels were to follow, and although Mailer has maintained his cynicism in regard to American society and to the evil and weakness within man, it will be shown how he progressed steadily toward the vision of possible hope for individual salvation that is ''An American Dream''.