The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead: Premiere to Eternity?: Difference between revisions
m Added banner back. |
m I'm not sure how much of the original text has been changed. We may have to delete and begin again. |
||
| Line 3: | Line 3: | ||
{{MR05}}<!-- EDIT BELOW THIS LINE --> | {{MR05}}<!-- EDIT BELOW THIS LINE --> | ||
{{byline|last=Hicks|first=Alexander |abstract=A review of ''From Here To Eternity'' and ''The Naked and The Dead''. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr05hic}} | {{byline|last=Hicks|first=Alexander |abstract=A review of ''From Here To Eternity'' and ''The Naked and The Dead''. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr05hic}} | ||
{{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. | {{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.{{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. | {{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.{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}} }} | ||
{{dc|dc=J|ames Jones was a born novelist}}, and Norman Mailer was a born writer. This distinction holds across the two authors’ life work. I illustrate this distinction here for only the authors’ first published novels, ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''From Here to Eternity''. However, these illustrations help assess the quality of these two books and each author’s career.{{pg|318|319}} | {{dc|dc=J|ames Jones was a born novelist}}, and Norman Mailer was a born writer. This distinction holds across the two authors’ life work. I illustrate this distinction here for only the authors’ first published novels, ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''From Here to Eternity''. However, these illustrations help assess the quality of these two books and each author’s career.{{pg|318|319}} | ||
| Line 19: | Line 19: | ||
By the end of Chapter Two, we know of the principal protagonist, Prewitt, whose place in the Company he is leaving, and we know something about the Kentucky mountains from which he hails. Within a few more chapters, Prewitt is deeply engaged in his new world of Company G: the stern but fatherly Warden, the jokester’s friend Pfc. Maggio, company commander Holmes, and the numerous sharply drawn men who will “soljer” and chat and play cards with Prewitt and try to force him to box for the Company or almost make him wish he had, including Anderson, Bloom, Chaote, Kowalski, Leva, Mazzioli, Preem, and Stark. | By the end of Chapter Two, we know of the principal protagonist, Prewitt, whose place in the Company he is leaving, and we know something about the Kentucky mountains from which he hails. Within a few more chapters, Prewitt is deeply engaged in his new world of Company G: the stern but fatherly Warden, the jokester’s friend Pfc. Maggio, company commander Holmes, and the numerous sharply drawn men who will “soljer” and chat and play cards with Prewitt and try to force him to box for the Company or almost make him wish he had, including Anderson, Bloom, Chaote, Kowalski, Leva, Mazzioli, Preem, and Stark. | ||
The dialogue is masterful. Physical and social action is evoked by concrete description and adept use of the empathetic first-person indirect, a vivid and seamlessly shifting point of view on the action and its social circumstance. If there is a mode of writing other than Frye’s | The dialogue is masterful. Physical and social action clearly is evoked by concrete description and adept use of the empathetic first-person indirect, a vivid and seamlessly shifting point of view on the action and its social circumstance. If there is a mode of writing other than Frye’s “novel” that is aptly evoked by ''Eternity'', it is Frye’s “drama” in which the author hides from the audience and their direct experience.{{sfn|Frye|1957|p=239}} Characters jump off the page, as in this early exchange between Prewitt and Maggio: | ||
<blockquote>“If I had knew,” he said to Prewitt, whose bunk was two beds from his own in Chief Choate’s squad, “if I had only knew what this man’s Army had been like. Of all the people in this outfit, they give that vacant Pfc to Bloom. Because he is a punchie.” | <blockquote>“If I had knew,” he said to Prewitt, whose bunk was two beds from his own in Chief Choate’s squad, “if I had only knew what this man’s Army had been like. Of all the people in this outfit, they give that vacant Pfc to Bloom. Because he is a punchie.” | ||