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
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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
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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
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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 reflecting 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.
Narratives written following World War I appear torn between the traditional impulse of repression and the psychoanalytic credo of repetition. There is no question of the trauma experienced by the participants and witnesses of World War I. First-hand narratives such as Richard Aldington’s (1929) Death of a Hero and Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929) All Quiet on the Western Front attempt to capture the churned and shattered landscapes— mental, physical, and geographical—shaped by narrative point(s) of view. David Craig and Michael Egan suggest that the understanding of World War I is best described by the phrase—the “obliteration of humanity” (12). Craig and Egan observe that the “filth, terror and injuries of war had, since prehistoric times, been glorified out of recognition by the chroniclers and bards,
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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period.
War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) Tender is the Night and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) Mrs. Dalloway explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss. The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures.
Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World
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World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war. The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).
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