User:KaraCroissant/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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It has been a triple error. He has been contradictory, rebellious and facetious. (411–2)

</blockquote>

Interestingly, everyone, including the narrator, thinks Cummings has made an error here, and he probably has in the eyes of these mere mortals, but actually, Cummings,who plays by the rules of the classical gods, has not.Cummings views war, almost literally, in fact, much like Dick Diver expressed in Fitzgerald’s ''Tender Is the Night'', as a “love battle” (57). According to this thinking, all war was a battle fought between two men who were in love with themselves and what they do. To General Cummings, war or any visceral contest was always psychosexual. Underscoring this point is the very idealistic Lieutenant Hearns’ discovery that Cummings is making battlefield decisions based almost directly on his rhetorical interactions with him—in reaction, actually, to Cummings’s repressed homosexual desire for his lieutenant aide-de-camp. He is a man indeed who enjoys verbal combat. When he discovers this secret psychosexual truth, Hearns leaves his safe staff job for one directly on the front for which he is subsequently killed. For the general’s part, his actions come from a combination of submerged homosexual desire and the sociopathic need to fulfill every impulse, even if they follow a complicated sublimation pattern and even if they cause serious causality rates. No matter the need or method, Hearn nevertheless uncovered a painful metaphysical lesson about warfare (at least according to Mailer’s view of life): Every army needs a controlled killer in charge of its army, but with the advent of modern technological weapons, the tragic and traumatic consequences of these men are not only enormous but long lasting as well.

In their own unique way, the object of Cummings’ verbal sparring, fellow West Pointers Lee and Grant, could also be seen as sociopathic killers on a large scale, despite Lee’s and Grant’s somewhat hagiological status.Although they are typically used as foils to each other, Lee and Grant are more accurately understood as two different faces on the same coin. Grant is the military organizational genius who understood the primary principle of military mathematics. He had twice as many men and ten times the resources as the enemy, and he knew how best to employ that math. Grant used blunt force trauma not only to pound the enemy into submission, to compound his mathematical advantage, but also to pound his own army into being a sharp fighting force. But Grant also needed to lose control of himself with alcohol and tobacco on occasion to function psychologically in the places that his genius took him. On the other side of the coin, Lee is the courtly and courteous well-bred Southerner, undermanned and eventually out-resourced. He was typically so controlled in what he did that he could tune out even the most disconcerting and devastating violence around him. Yet on one occasion, during the 1864 Battle of the Spotsylvania, he snapped, losing control of himself so profoundly that his soldiers had to grab his reins and shout “Lee to the rear” to keep him from charging headlong into a murderous pitched battle (United States 54–55). This tangible anger, from a man who was archetypically well-mannered, originated from his profound love for his fellow Southerners. His anger was nurtured by his realization that he was compelled to sacrifice his life and theirs for ''the mythological Cause''. The deepest depths of this anger, however, can be framed by the first premise of Lee’s warrior syllogism, his thesis, which was always to be the consummate aggressor in battle. Until the advent of Grant, who sacrificed his men for a modern government that had all the mathematical advantages, Lee had had no binary counterpart. Until that historical moment, Lee had been aggressive and victorious, and the large-scale sacrifices had been psychologically manageable.

During the spring and summer of 1864, Lee met not so much his match but his more dominant syllogistic twin, the other face of a catastrophic coin. In that moment, Lee knew what the ultimate conclusion had to be—the coin would flip. Grant’s entry into the equation meant the end of the war and the fighting and the end of doing what Lee had always been called to do: attack. Remember: Lee was the man who said that is was a good thing war was so horrible because we would love it too much if it weren’t (United States 34).

At the May,1864, Battle of Spotsylvania, both sides of the Hegelian coin were cast. For Lee, the war had become too horrible, and the end was finally in sight. However, what truly altered Lee was the fact that he was, for the first time in his life, no longer the assertive thesis, the archetypal aggressor, the man constantly on the offense, in charge of himself and fate. With Grant, Lee had suddenly become the archetypical submissive antithesis; in effect, he had become emasculated but not unmanned. To be more precise, the mythological Lee was outmanned and out supplied and tragically, mathematically disadvantaged.Although Lee was bested, he did remain intact in the process, not diminished as much as altered. It does not take much knowledge of Freudian psychoanalytic theory to speculate what kind of dreams Lee was having at the time, and his biographer does state that he had begun having troubled sleep as well as physical deterioration, which was new for him.

This out-manning of the chivalric Lee by the transfigured hero in the guise of Grant is the moment that modernity profoundly took over in Western civilization warfare and eventually literature. Grant is still a hero, but one of a different shape and form than the traditional Lee. The rough, slouching Grant becomes the Yeatsian beast of modernity. However, Grant’s archetype could only emerge when juxtaposed against the perfect foil—Lee. In the age of Grant, realism of course was the immediate literary reaction. With World War I, and the rise of modernist literature, the archetypal shift propagated by Grant vs. Lee was resolved. The modernist epic re-imaging through Pound and Eliot became the final solution. So by the time of World War II, with Mailer especially, Lee’s classical sensibilities have been imaginatively subsumed by Grant’s calculus for modern war.

The literary descendents of these historical figures, thus, logically reflect the strategies for emotionless mass destruction that allowed Grant to reunite the Union. Mailer’s Cummings is a textbook case in point. More than any other member of his West Point class and his instructor, Cummings knew about all this war madness, even then as a cadet, about how the mind of great generals work, how they derive strategy and tactics out of their own psychological needs, and how the especially great soldiers pull battle plans out of their otherwise inexplicable genius, out of motives that could be called pure if they could ever be clearly understood. Important generals, like anyone else who makes history change, are not taught their changeling genius at places like the military academies, but that is where they discover their role models and that is where their combative, sociopathic personalities are

sharpened into fighting form. In Mailer’s world, the motives and impulses of men who change history, whether they are an Army general, a presidential assassin, a serial killer, or Gary Gilmore, are never actually understood by the characters themselves or especially the readers; they are just acted upon. That is truly what makes them special: They are not afraid to act upon even their worst impulses. Thus, this one allusion from ''The Naked and the Dead'' does not distract from Mailer’s text but rather illuminates more fully Cummings’ character,which ultimately illustrates that in military organizations, the psychology of the individual commander directly affects the lives of the common soldier: The ones who pay the price from those who give the orders.

With all of this in mind, one can also clearly see how Hemingway’s Cantwell represents the sacrificial soldier for a modern bureaucratic army, the transfigured Jackson, who dies at the moment of his greatest victory. While Jackson’s death is heroic, Cantwell’s is ignominious in that his greatest victory is not a military one, but merely a personal one. His is a modern, reductive victory over himself and the acceptance of his death. Cantwell is merely another soldier who has had to pay the price of modern warfare. On the other hand, Mailer’s Cummings forms another face on the coin, but of a different type. He is the emotionless sacrificer—the general who has minted Grant’s legacy into a modern, sociopathic coinage. As these two allusions to the American Civil War demonstrate, these two major writers of the Twentieth Century, whose legacies will remain influential throughout the Twenty-First century, understood the influence of this conflict on the American psyche. Mailer and Hemingway, both veterans of war themselves, viscerally understood this war’s enormous costs created a trauma that permeates and promulgates the modern vernacular and literature, illuminating the point that the American Civil War, especially in the costs that it took to fight it, accelerated the dramatic shift to the modern sensibility.

@@ Line 35: / Line 35: @@
 It has been a triple error. He has been contradictory, rebellious and facetious. (411–2)
 </blockquote>
+Interestingly, everyone, including the narrator, thinks Cummings has made an error here, and he probably has in the eyes of these mere mortals, but actually, Cummings,who plays by the rules of the classical gods, has not.Cummings views war, almost literally, in fact, much like Dick Diver expressed in Fitzgerald’s ''Tender Is the Night'', as a “love battle” (57). According to this thinking, all war was a battle fought between two men who were in love with themselves and what they do. To General Cummings, war or any visceral contest was always psychosexual. Underscoring this point is the very idealistic Lieutenant Hearns’ discovery that Cummings is making battlefield decisions based almost directly on his rhetorical interactions with him—in reaction, actually, to Cummings’s repressed homosexual desire for his lieutenant aide-de-camp. He is a man indeed who enjoys verbal combat. When he discovers this secret psychosexual truth, Hearns leaves his safe staff job for one directly on the front for which he is subsequently killed. For the general’s part, his actions come from a combination of submerged homosexual desire and the sociopathic need to fulfill every impulse, even if they follow a complicated sublimation pattern and even if they  cause serious causality rates. No matter the need or method, Hearn nevertheless uncovered a painful metaphysical lesson about warfare (at least according to Mailer’s view of life): Every army needs a controlled killer in charge of its army, but with the advent of modern technological weapons, the tragic and traumatic consequences of these men are not only enormous but long lasting as well.
+{{pg|85|86}}
+In their own unique way, the object of Cummings’ verbal sparring, fellow West Pointers Lee and Grant, could also be seen as sociopathic killers on a large scale, despite Lee’s and Grant’s somewhat hagiological status.Although they are typically used as foils to each other, Lee and Grant are more accurately understood as two different faces on the same coin. Grant is the military organizational genius who understood the primary principle of military mathematics. He had twice as many men and ten times the resources as the enemy, and he knew how best to employ that math. Grant used blunt force trauma not only to pound the enemy into submission, to compound his mathematical advantage, but also to pound his own army into being a sharp fighting force. But Grant also needed to lose control of himself with alcohol and tobacco on occasion to function psychologically in the places that his genius took him. On the other side of the coin, Lee is the courtly and courteous well-bred Southerner, undermanned and eventually out-resourced. He was typically so controlled in what he did that he could tune out even the most disconcerting and devastating violence around him. Yet on one occasion, during the 1864 Battle of the Spotsylvania, he snapped, losing control of himself so profoundly that his soldiers had to grab his reins and shout “Lee to the rear” to keep him from charging headlong into a murderous pitched battle (United States 54–55). This tangible anger, from a man who was archetypically well-mannered, originated from his profound love for his fellow Southerners. His anger was nurtured by his realization that he was compelled to sacrifice his life and theirs for ''the mythological Cause''. The deepest depths of this anger, however, can be framed by the first premise of Lee’s warrior syllogism, his thesis, which was always to be the consummate aggressor in battle. Until the advent of Grant, who sacrificed his men for a modern government that had all the mathematical advantages, Lee had had no binary counterpart. Until that historical moment, Lee had been aggressive and victorious, and the large-scale sacrifices had been psychologically manageable.
+During the spring and summer of 1864, Lee met not so much his match but his more dominant syllogistic twin, the other face of a catastrophic coin. In that moment, Lee knew what the ultimate conclusion had to be—the coin would flip. Grant’s entry into the equation meant the end of the war and the fighting and the end of doing what Lee had always been called to do: attack. Remember: Lee was the man who said that is was a good thing war was so horrible because we would love it too much if it weren’t (United States 34).
+{{pg|86|87}}
+At the May,1864, Battle of Spotsylvania, both sides of the Hegelian coin were cast. For Lee, the war had become too horrible, and the end was finally in sight. However, what truly altered Lee was the fact that he was, for the first time in his life, no longer the assertive thesis, the archetypal aggressor, the man constantly on the offense, in charge of himself and fate. With Grant, Lee had suddenly become the archetypical submissive antithesis; in effect, he had become emasculated but not unmanned. To be more precise, the mythological Lee was outmanned and out supplied and tragically, mathematically disadvantaged.Although Lee was bested, he did remain intact in the process, not diminished as much as altered. It does not take much knowledge of Freudian psychoanalytic theory to speculate what kind of dreams Lee was having at the time, and his biographer does state that he had begun having troubled sleep as well as physical deterioration, which was new for him.
+This out-manning of the chivalric Lee by the transfigured hero in the guise of Grant is the moment that modernity profoundly took over in Western civilization warfare and eventually literature. Grant is still a hero, but one of a different shape and form than the traditional Lee. The rough, slouching Grant becomes the Yeatsian beast of modernity. However, Grant’s archetype could only emerge when juxtaposed against the perfect foil—Lee. In the age of Grant, realism of course was the immediate literary reaction. With World War I, and the rise of modernist literature, the archetypal shift propagated by Grant vs. Lee was resolved. The modernist epic re-imaging through Pound and Eliot became the final solution. So by the time of World War II, with Mailer especially, Lee’s classical sensibilities have been imaginatively subsumed by Grant’s calculus for modern war.
+The literary descendents of these historical figures, thus, logically reflect the strategies for emotionless mass destruction that allowed Grant to reunite the Union. Mailer’s Cummings is a textbook case in point. More than any other member of his West Point class and his instructor, Cummings knew about all this war madness, even then as a cadet, about how the mind of great generals work, how they derive strategy and tactics out of their own psychological needs, and how the especially great soldiers pull battle plans out of their otherwise inexplicable genius, out of motives that could be called pure if they could ever be clearly understood. Important generals, like anyone else who makes history change, are not taught their changeling genius at places like the military academies, but that is where they discover their role models and that is where their combative, sociopathic personalities are
+{{pg|87|88}}
+sharpened into fighting form. In Mailer’s world, the motives and impulses of men who change history, whether they are an Army general, a presidential assassin, a serial killer, or Gary Gilmore, are never actually understood by the characters themselves or especially the readers; they are just acted upon. That is truly what makes them special: They are not afraid to act upon even their worst impulses. Thus, this one allusion from ''The Naked and the Dead'' does not distract from Mailer’s text but rather illuminates more fully Cummings’ character,which ultimately illustrates that in military organizations, the psychology of the individual commander directly affects the lives of the common soldier: The ones who pay the price from those who give the orders.
+With all of this in mind, one can also clearly see how Hemingway’s Cantwell represents the sacrificial soldier for a modern bureaucratic army, the transfigured Jackson, who dies at the moment of his greatest victory. While Jackson’s death is heroic, Cantwell’s is ignominious in that his greatest victory is not a military one, but merely a personal one. His is a modern, reductive victory over himself and the acceptance of his death. Cantwell is merely another soldier who has had to pay the price of modern warfare. On the other hand, Mailer’s Cummings forms another face on the coin, but of a different type. He is the emotionless sacrificer—the general who has minted Grant’s legacy into a modern, sociopathic coinage. As these two allusions to the American Civil War demonstrate, these two major writers of the Twentieth Century, whose legacies will remain influential throughout the Twenty-First century, understood the influence of this conflict on the American psyche. Mailer and Hemingway, both veterans of war themselves, viscerally understood this war’s enormous costs created a trauma that permeates and promulgates the modern vernacular and literature, illuminating the point that the American Civil War, especially in the costs that it took to fight it, accelerated the dramatic shift to the modern sensibility.