The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead: Premiere to Eternity?: Difference between revisions
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{{cquote|The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their personae or social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters in vacuo idealized by Revery. However conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable will likely break out of his pages.|author=Northrop Frye|source=''The Four Forms of Prose Fiction''{{sfn| | {{cquote|The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their personae or social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters in vacuo idealized by Revery. However conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable will likely break out of his pages.|author=Northrop Frye|source=''The Four Forms of Prose Fiction''{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}}}} | ||
{{cquote|The epic requires as its object the occurrence of an action, which must be expressed in the breadth of its circumstances and relations as a rich event connected with the total world of a nation and epoch.|author=Franco Moretti|source=''Modern Epic:The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez’’{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}}} | {{cquote|The epic requires as its object the occurrence of an action, which must be expressed in the breadth of its circumstances and relations as a rich event connected with the total world of a nation and epoch.|author=Franco Moretti|source=''Modern Epic:The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez’’{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}}} | ||
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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 breaking 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). | 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 breaking 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). | ||
{{pg|323|324}} | {{pg|323|324}} | ||
Still, not even evoking 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. | Still, not even evoking 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|p=11-14}} | 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|p=11-14}} | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
Although ''Naked'' has no individual hero—Croft is arguably an antihero— the action of the Army on Anopopei might be considered heroic. For example, the book begins with a statement about the invading force—the memorable “Nobody could sleep . . . all over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to{{pg|324|325}} be dead”—and it ends with a description of the “mop up” or “successful” campaign.{{sfn|Meyer|2005 | Although ''Naked'' has no individual hero—Croft is arguably an antihero— the action of the Army on Anopopei might be considered heroic. For example, the book begins with a statement about the invading force—the memorable “Nobody could sleep . . . all over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to{{pg|324|325}} be dead”—and it ends with a description of the “mop up” or “successful” campaign.{{sfn|Meyer|2005}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996}} | ||
Further, ''Naked ’s'' use of its Time Machine segments reaches out toward the “expression” of the “total world of a nation and epoch”. {{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}} These devices democratically apply the model of Dos Passos’s elite biographic profiles of great Americans in the ''U.S.A.'' to the description of the American ‘every man’. | Further, ''Naked ’s'' use of its Time Machine segments reaches out toward the “expression” of the “total world of a nation and epoch”. {{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}} These devices democratically apply the model of Dos Passos’s elite biographic profiles of great Americans in the ''U.S.A.'' to the description of the American ‘every man’. | ||
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{{pg|325|326}} | {{pg|325|326}} | ||
Instead, he leaves us with Major Dalleson captivated by the USO poster and PR charm of the emerging, somewhat demilitarized managerial age, thinking with more innocence than is imaginable for Cummings, “He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co-ordinate grid system laid over it”.{{sfn|Moretti|1996 | Instead, he leaves us with Major Dalleson captivated by the USO poster and PR charm of the emerging, somewhat demilitarized managerial age, thinking with more innocence than is imaginable for Cummings, “He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co-ordinate grid system laid over it”.{{sfn|Moretti|1996}} | ||
==Style, Construction, and Assessment== | ==Style, Construction, and Assessment== | ||