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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{{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.|author=Northrop Frye|source=''The Four Forms of Prose Fiction''{{sfn|Mailer|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.|author=Franco Moretti|source=''Modern Epic:The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez’’{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}}}

==Two Types of Fiction==

<blockquote>When he finished packing, he walked out onto the third-floor porch of the barracks, brushing the dust from his hands. He was a very neat and deceptively slim young man in summer khakis that were still fresh early in the morning.

If there are jarring notes in ''Eternity'', they are stylistic. They are mainly comprised of faulty diction and idiosyncratic rhetoric that tends to arise when the writing veers off into an authorial voice distanced from specific characters and found within sociologically detailed dramatic situations. I address instances of the “bad” writing that has tended to conspire against the book’s chances for immortality, especially after eventually falling under the shadow of extensively negative reviews reviling Jones’s style that ''Some Came Running'' cast.

Although ''Naked'' is hardly a romance, by the ascent of Mt. Anaka, Croft becomes a “psychological archetype” who “radiates a glow of subjective intensity”{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}}. Indeed, with Croft, “something nihilistic and untamable” seems, in Frye’s words, “to keep breaking out of ” [Mailer’s] pages” as would occur in much subsequent writing by Mailer {{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}}. However, a novelistic romancer, even as a fiction writer, will not suffice in Mailer. His work resonates not only as novel and romance but also as confession (close to the tenor of O’Shaughnessy’s tale) and anatomy or “Mannipean satire” (with Mailer himself in ''The Armies of the Night'' and with the Presidential contenders of Mailer’s presidential campaign chronicles).

{{pg|323|324}}

Still, not even evoking the full range of Frye’s four fictive modes will suffice to categorize much of Mailer’s work. In particular, The Naked and the Dead evokes Moretti’s reference to the appearance of literary “one-off cases, oddities, anomalies” in his discussion of that variant of the high modernist fiction he terms “the modern epic” in his 1996 The Modern Epic{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=1}}.

If the original epic can be boiled down rather conventionally into a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation, the “modern epic” is a variation of the epic in which the heroic is downplayed and the expression of the “total world of a nation and epoch” extends to the “supranational” sphere, in which we encounter a somewhat incongruous ungainly mix of modes of expression—not only the very novelistic accounts of exchanges among the tale’s principals but the confessional ardor of Ishmael’s voice when he accounts his high spirits, the cataloging of seamen’s conversation during watches, the lessons in cytology, the pseudo-Shakespearean soliloquies of Ahab along on the forecastle{{sfn|Meyer|2005|p=2128}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11-14}}.

With the Ahab-like ardor of Croft ascending Mt. Anaka, the social and linguistic cataloging of social types and vernaculars in Time Machine and Chow Line segments, and the epic qualities of the book’s framing and charting, and detailed depiction of the Anopopei campaign and its combat actions; and the fundamental novelistic interactions among the principals, each with members of his immediate sphere—Cummings, Hearn, and Croft, each with his circle of underlings—''The Naked and the Dead'' fits the template of the “modern epic” quite well.

Although ''Naked'' has no individual hero—Croft is arguably an antihero— the action of the Army on Anopopei might be considered heroic. For example, the book begins with a statement about the invading force—the memorable “Nobody could sleep . . . all over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to{{pg|324|325}} be dead”—and it ends with a description of the “mop up” or “successful” campaign{{sfn|Meyer|2005|p=3}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=715}}.

Further, ''Naked ’s'' use of its Time Machine segments reaches out toward the “expression” of the “total world of a nation and epoch” {{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}. These devices democratically apply the model of Dos Passos’s elite biographic profiles of great Americans in the ''U.S.A.'' to the description of the American “every man.”

In place of ''U.S.A.’s''  Jack Reed and TR, aviators like the Wright Brothers, lovers like Rudolph Valentino, financiers like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan, we get Hispanic Texans like Julio Martinez; Texan and Virgin- ian rednecks Sam Croft and Woodrow Wilson; Montana miner and hobo Red Velsen; working-class Bostonian Irishman Will Gallagher and working-class Jewish Brooklynite Joey Goldstein; small-town Northeastern/Midwestern middleclass William Brown; Northeastern/Midwestern, upper-class, Harvard-educated Left intellectual Robert Hearn; and Northeastern/Midwestern, upper-class, West Point-educated Far Right intellectual General Cummings.

Indeed, ''Naked’s'' use of its Time Machine segments extends the ''U.S.A.’s'' encyclopedia of American social types and speech during the second and third decades of the twentieth century to the third and early fourth decades of the century, for the Time Machine profiles deal with the biographies that highlight the preponderantly 1930s and early 1940s adolescence and youth of ''Naked’s'' cast on its principal 1944-ish stage.

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# *The atmosphere of The Naked and the Dead, the overspirit, is Tolstoyan; the rococo comes out of Dos Passos; the fundamental slogging style from Farrell, and the occasional overrich de- scriptions from Wolfe,” said Mailer to interviewer Peter Manso {{sfn|Manso|1985|p=101}}.

==Work Cited==

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

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