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

'''''From Here to Eternity''''' Jones has been criticized for bad writing. The main site of this criticism and defenses against it is in writing on ''Some Came Running''. However, as we shall see, these criticisms had precursors in responses to ''From Here to Eternity''.{{sfn|Garrett|1984|p=100}} Writing on ''Some Came Running'', Edmund Fuller wrote, "[I]f you like bad grammar...shoddy and befuddled philosophy, ''Some Came Running'' is your book," and Time that "Choctaw rather than English would appear to be [Jones's] first language".{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=38}} And, J. Donald Adams attributed Jones with having a "fatuous pride in being illiterate".{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=38}}

Similarly, I recall a 1960s episode of ''The David Susskind Show'' in which Gore Vidal dismissed Jones's book for bad writing after praising Fred Zin-Neumann's film  Eternity. Although I am both a Jones and a Bloom fan, I was not surprised when I realized that Jones was entirely unmentioned in the extensive critical works of the stylistically finicky Harold Bloom.

''From Here to Eternity'' can only receive glancing blows from the criticisms of Jones’s writing for that book because these are largely irrelevant to most of the book’s writing. The same can be said for ''The Thin Red Line'' and ''Whistle''. ''Some Came Running'' may be another story. (For convenience, I ignore all of Jones’s books, but only the four that were mentioned.) On the one hand, the power of its underlying narrative, documentary scope and cogency, and rich characterization seems to compare to that of ''From Here to Eternity''. (Here we have aspects of Jones’s creativity perhaps even more effectively expressed by Minnelli’s 1958 film than by Zinnemann’s excellent 1953 one.) Moreover, Jones scholars have claimed with great zeal thematic and spiritual merits for the voluminous stretches of writing in ''Running'' that do not conform to the model of transparent writing and drama-like novelistic presentation described here for ''Running''. Alas, with ''Running'', critics of Jones’s style have a large target. Perhaps champions of Jones might devise defenses for his literary style—say via elaboration of Garrett’s claim that what looks awkward about the style of ''Running'' has an unappreciated idiomatic grace. However, such a defense seems to me no more than sketched.{{pg|329|330}}

 In particular, they have charged that its narrative is encumbered and diffused by the Time Machine profiles of principal characters and by a late usurpation of the protagonist’s role by Sergeant Croft. Here, I dispute these criticisms partly because they are put in a new, more accurate light that is more favorable to ''Naked'' when this is considered an instance of Moretti’s ‘modern epic’. Regarding the sometimes imputed ungainliness of the Time Machine segments, critics have overlooked the function of the Time Machine segments—not as a plot element in a well-structured novelistic narrative, but as a kind of post-Crash extension of the 1910-1930 sociological and linguistic profile of the U.S.A. provided by the social disparate cast of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. In doing this, they fail to judge ''Naked'' as a “modern epic” with stress on “a summation of a social and cultural totality” and as no simple traditional war novel.

{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}

==Work Cited==

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* {{cite book |title=The Four Forms of Prose Fiction |date= |publisher=Hudson Review 2.4 (Winter 1950) |publication-date=7 September 2011 |pages=582-595}}

* {{cite book |last=Garret |first=George P. |url= |title=James Jones |date=1984 |publisher=New York: Harcourt,1984 |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |title=The Naked and the Dead |date= |publisher=New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984 |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1984 |page= |access-date=}}

* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |publisher=New York: Simon |year=1985 |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1985 |page= |access-date=}}

* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=London: Verso |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}

* {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title="Mailers Rhythm" The Norman Mailer Society Conference  |isbn= |edition=Keynote Speaker |location=Provincetown, MA |publication-date=2008 |page= |access-date=}}

{{refend}}