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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Turning to the stylistic merits of the Time Machine segments—and not just their proclaimed obtrusiveness as excessively flashy, overly documented, philosophically deterministic baggage for an effective war novel and campaign narrative—critics have been unperceptive. They have also dismissed the Time Machine segments as overly derivative—as too closely modelled after Dos Passos's telegraphed biographies of national elites in the ''U.S.A.'' However, in making this criticism, critics have overlooked how Mailer's use of the Time Machine devices follows Pound's modernist injunction to ‘make it new’. In particular, they have missed how thoroughly democratic and sometimes playful Mailer's Time Machines are.{{pg|333|334}} | Turning to the stylistic merits of the Time Machine segments—and not just their proclaimed obtrusiveness as excessively flashy, overly documented, philosophically deterministic baggage for an effective war novel and campaign narrative—critics have been unperceptive. They have also dismissed the Time Machine segments as overly derivative—as too closely modelled after Dos Passos's telegraphed biographies of national elites in the ''U.S.A.'' However, in making this criticism, critics have overlooked how Mailer's use of the Time Machine devices follows Pound's modernist injunction to ‘make it new’. In particular, they have missed how thoroughly democratic and sometimes playful Mailer's Time Machines are.{{pg|333|334}} | ||
In contrast with Dos Passos’s use of his profiles to telegraph the life of important national figures in shaping the world, where he situates his cast of rather everyday fictional characters, Mailer’s Time Machine bios file numerous faces of 'everyman.' They do so via transferring Dos | In contrast with Dos Passos’s use of his profiles to telegraph the life of important national figures in shaping the world, where he situates his cast of rather everyday fictional characters, Mailer’s Time Machine bios file numerous faces of 'everyman.' They do so via transferring Dos Passos’s elite-oriented device to a popular subject matter. As Mailer writes in the first Time Machine, which profiles Julio Martinez, “Mexican boys also breathe the American Fables, also want to be heroes, aviators, lovers, financiers”.{{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=55}} This is to say that they also want to be figures like those of the ''U.S.A.'' biographers, heroes like Jack Reed and TR, aviators like the Wright Brothers, lovers like Rudolph Valentino, and financiers like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan. They have also failed to notice such playful touches as we find in Mailer’s Woodrow Wilson Time Machine episode. | ||
This evokes Dos Passos’s Meester Veelson biography of President Woodrow Wilson in ''The 42nd Parallel'' in more than title. At the outset of his profile of the white-trash Wilson, Mailer presents him in “''a pair of round, silver-rimmed glasses''” reminiscent of those that appeared on the patrician Southern President in the photograph.{{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=326}} | This evokes Dos Passos’s Meester Veelson biography of President Woodrow Wilson in ''The 42nd Parallel'' in more than title. At the outset of his profile of the white-trash Wilson, Mailer presents him in “''a pair of round, silver-rimmed glasses''” reminiscent of those that appeared on the patrician Southern President in the photograph.{{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=326}} | ||