The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead

THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF THE TRAUMA OF WAR functions through family stories, cultural representations appearing in film and television and, of course, various narratives and novels that position war in the integrity and structure of story. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are two of the most important illustrators of the effects of war and trauma in twentieth century American literature. Hemingway’s narratives have always been linked to the experience of war. James Nagel observes that perhaps it is normal to link the theme of psychic discord expressed in Hemingway’s narratives to the experience in war related to Hemingway’s time spent at various fronts (213). The disjuncture expressed in the various narrative structures in Hemingway’s fiction reveals a connection between the trauma of war and representations of subjectivity and objectivity. Mailer’s fiction also connects to his experiences in war and with violence. Critics have sometimes cast Mailer as a misogynist and a violent-centric writer whose fiction reflects the damage done to man by a violent and chaotic world.

Narrative tension in the narrative structures between external and internal perspectives in American war fiction corresponds to the trauma of war— World War I and World War II. Trauma is best explained in the classical sense—as being an experience that is not fully assimilated as the experience

page 311

---

page 312

occurs. The experience of trauma during war operates as a complex play between the knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The question surrounding the expression of narrative tension in American war fiction arises in relation to how a body of literature deals with subjects who are illustrated as speaking from the abject position in relation to the representation of war trauma, rather than engaging trauma in a more traditional subject or object narrative position in the structure of the fiction.

Modern and contemporary American narrative structures that attempt to embody traumatic experiences of war treat an experience not occurring within normal subjective or objective expressions of narrative understandings. Therefore, narratives deploy a structure and a point of view that differs from earlier structures involving more defined and stable positions of subjectivity and objectivity. In the narrative presentation of war in literary structures, the awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject; it is knowledge that operates from without and within and sometimes from another space of understanding. The novels and narratives that arise out of the experience of World War II, in particular, engage a structure that uses a point of view that attempts to speak from and not to the abject experience and understanding of trauma and war.

NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE TRAUMA OF WAR

American war narratives following World War I and World War II reference a relatively inchoate tradition of American war writing initiated by the fiction following the first truly American war, the Civil War. The narratives that draw on the Civil War engage a narrative structure of questioning and concern with subjectivity and objectivity. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and Ambrose Bierce’s Chickamauga(1891) represent this new attempt of constructing a war narrative. In these war stories, the structure of the narrative appears to oscillate between traditional presentations of narrative subjectivity and objectivity as these authors attempt to speak of the dark knowledge of war and trauma. Robert Penn Warren in The Legacy of the Civil War argues that the fictions following the Civil War engage the idea that to have history one has to have stories, and the nature of these stories is to be fallen, to face the dark side of one’s own nature, and to have some dark knowledge one cannot bear having. Warren’s notions preface a tension that ultimately surfaces in the narratives of modern and contemporary American war

page 312

---

page 313

fiction. Authors, during the period following the Civil War, understood that capturing the tension of war trauma in a narrative structure requires a move beyond romantic dialogue or realistic narrative summary.

American narratives surrounding the Great War or World War I subsequently reflect an increasing awareness of trauma and the abject nature of the experience of war on the structure of the narrative, while representing the possibility of ordering the traumatic chaos of war. World War I, described by H.G. Wells as the “war to end all wars,” appears initially in the American landscape almost as an afterthought. President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to engage America in the European conflict contributes to an early American sense of distance with the conflict. As America enters the war in April of 1917, however, an era of conscription and service weaves through the American consciousness. The conscripted masses of American soldiers face a war-torn landscape unlike any experienced before in war, resplendent with men fighting from muddy trenches, attacking from armored tanks, bombing from war planes, and gassing from canons. The horror of war surrounding the newly minted American soldiers introduces a new understanding and mental chaos into the psyches of soldiers. Jennifer Keene asserts that few combatants directly confronted the irrationality of the war landscape. Instead, Keene argues, these men remained adamant in believing in order that could be discerned in the chaos of frontline life (49). The narratives of the period reference this attempt at projecting order into and onto the chaotic structure and experience of the traumas of war. The fictions of the Great War and after reflect an increasing desire to witness and project some semblance of order within the chaos of war, as seen in the content and structure of the narratives.