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PAUL BOYER POINTS OUT THAT IN MOST OF THE MAJOR AMERICAN NOVELS of the immediate post-Hiroshima years—Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey; Saul Bellow’s The Victim; Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead— “the atomic bomb is notable by its absence.”[1] Mailer’s 1948 war novel adheres to the era’s avoidance of the atomic bomb by focusing on acceptable socio-political issues, but differs from other war novels of the period through its preoccupation with the uncanny, defined by Freud in his seminal essay on the topic as a profound dread provoked “either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.”[2] Although the uncanny remains an often frustratingly broad topic, mostly because it is a concept “whose entire denotation is a connotation,” most critics adhere to Freud’s definition of the uncanny as something familiar made strange.[3][a] Intellectual uncertainty regarding the animate nature of what is inanimate and vice versa (as provoked by automatons or episodes of uncontrollable behavior), and the “return of the repressed” are all deemed capable of eliciting profound discomfort. Mailer’s ostensibly realist text is complicated by its depiction of weird mechanical soldiers who are plagued with superstitions regarding death and filled with dread provoked by an oddly menacing environment. This conscious use of the uncanny illustrates popular postwar concerns

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connected with conformity and totalitarianism, but the real strangeness of The Naked and the Dead relies on its ability to reveal unconscious fears connected with Mailer’s personal uncertainties regarding his writing and cultural unease about the atomic bomb.

The destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the annihilation of their civilian populations are never mentioned in novels such as Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1951) and James Gould Cozzens’ Guard of Honor (1948), novels which purport to be about World War II but which exclude a fundamental part of the conflict. As Paul Brians points out, “nuclear war must be the most carefully avoided topic of general significance in the contemporary world.”[4] Although the bomb provoked significant debate in the newspapers of 1945, there was a silence in serious literature revealing both the difficulty of representing mass death and how well that mass death was repressed.[b] Although nearly 100,00 feet of color film were filmed of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by Air Force film crews following the bombings, the entirety of this documentation was classified top secret because of the horror it revealed.[5] The human toll of the atomic bomb was so repressed that in 1955 when the “Hiroshima Maidens” visited the United States in order to have corrective surgery for their radiation burns (a trip organized by a group of Americans), some people were so threatened by this reification of American atrocity that they wondered whether the organizers of the visit were Communist agents.[6]

The difficulties inherent in the representation of mass death were exacerbated in America during the late 1940s and early 1950s by increasing conformity and widespread consensus, especially regarding the military. Mailer points out that a period of Cold War is “obviously equal to greater censorship” and suggests that “[i]f good writers write novels which are conventionally obscene or exceptionally radical, you can be sure that they would have one hell of a time getting their books published.” .[7] Although he establishes a clear delineation between an artist who “follows his own nature” and commercial talents who “do what they are obliged to do, and say what they are obliged to say,” Mailer’s desire for literary individualism coexisted with a strong desire for popular success, which countered his radicalism with a certain amount of accommodation to consensus. [8] Despite the fact that The Naked and the Dead depicts the Pacific conflict against the Japanese, Mailer adheres to the era’s avoidance of the bomb. When asked in an interview whether he believed

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that people want to “look into the abyss,” he replied, “No, I don’t. I think it’s very hard. I think people are petrified of it.”[9]

Mailer describes his first novel as “the book of a young engineer” written “mechanically” with the aid of a “sturdy” working plan utilizing extensive character dossiers and charts, thus emphasizing its consciously controlled construction.[10] Yet while the text’s comprehensive character studies and minute details regarding the hardships of military life contribute to a sense of its depiction of the gritty reality of war, the reality Mailer presents remained palatable enough to render the book a bestseller. One review highlights its canny way of appearing to leave “nothing to the imagination” while exposing “the blood, if not always the guts, of war.”[11] During the 1950s, Mailer became aware of a division in his mind between a “conscious intelligence” engaged with political issues and an unconscious mind “much more interested in other matters: murder, suicide, orgy, psychosis.” [12] This fascination with unconscious material, unacknowledged at the time of writing The Naked and the Dead, explains the text’s oscillation between familiar conventions of realism and a realism rendered uncannily strange. Although Mailer’s narrative strategy is designed to resist unconscious preoccupations, it cannot entirely keep them at bay. As Mailer himself points out, writing is “a very odd, spooky activity” and surging beneath the novel’s conscious delineation of socio-political issues are darker unconscious themes connected to Mailer’s haunting problem: the unbridgeable gap between his conscious and unconscious concerns.[13]

The conscious theme of the novel can be summarized as power: “the power of man overman, the power of military force, the power of political thought and polemic, the inexorable power of events on the lives of men.”[14] The platoon consists of one of almost every representative American type whose differences in class, politics, race and religion guarantee personal conflict. Mailer’s characters behave in ways controlled by their socio-economic backgrounds, which aligns The Naked and the Dead with the naturalistic works of writers such as Stephen Crane and John Dos Passos, but as much as individual powerlessness over fate is a part of the naturalistic worldview, much of this concern springs from Cold War sociological issues that would eventually develop into the popular figure of the corporate-controlled “organization man” as outlined in William Whyte’s non-fiction study The


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Organization Man and fictionalized in popular novels such as Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Mailer’s political interests see the

novel exploring the potential for the forces fighting fascism to behave in similarly totalitarian ways. A review in the New York Times reveals how carefully Mailer handled this potentially subversive theme when it points out that “Mr. Mailer obviously doesn’t like war, or the people who fight it,” but concludes that he is attempting to show “that much of its unpleasantness comes from the nature of the participants” rather than from any implicit problem with the American military.[11]

The nature of the war’s participants in The Naked and the Dead connects the novel to issues deemed relevant to postwar American life. Mailer suggests,

It was as if back in the late Forties and early Fifties a great many people unconsciously began to sense that they were getting further

and further away from themselves. There was something funny in the scheme of things. The whole apparatus of the buildings about us, the things we read, the things we eat, the things we see for entertainment, the philosophies about us, the faiths—everything was making it harder and harder for someone to have a sense of identity.[15]

Mailer’s apprehension of something wrong in postwar life defies clear expression and his grammatical errors between the past and present tense reveal something of the troubling vagueness of this estrangement. Loss of individual identity is linked with an obscure dread, suggesting that the loss of self in an era of conformity registers as uncanny. Mailer’s depiction of the subservience of the individual is far more worrying than other novels of the era concerned with the same theme, and his soldier automatons represent a disturbing manifestation of the loss of humanity.

Among all the psychical uncertainties that can evoke an uncanny feeling, doubt regarding the animate and the inanimate is one of the most potent, especially when this doubt “only makes itself felt obscurely in one’s consciousness.”[16] Historically the machine was often seen as somehow demonic, an obscure threat disruptive of traditional social practice, but it is the machine’s relationship to the human that renders it uncanny. Whereas

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in “the premodern instance the machine is thought to mimic the organic movements of the body,” in the modern instance “the machine becomes the

model, and the body is disciplined to its mechanistic specifications.” [17] In The Naked and the Dead, General Cummings decides that it is “a not entirely unproductive conceit to consider weapons as being something more than machines, as having personalities, perhaps, likenesses to the human.”[18] Fittingly, he also suggests that soldiers are “closer to machines than humans.”[19] Battle is thus transformed from the heroic clashes of history into “an organization of thousands of man-machines who dart with governing habits across a field, sweat like a radiator in the sun, shiver and become stiff like a piece of metal in the rain.” The General’s disturbing conclusion is “[w]e are not so discrete from the machine any longer, I detect it in my thinking.”[19] Intellectual uncertainty between the human and the inhuman is not merely played out on a physical level in Mailer’s novel but has infiltrated into the very deepest recesses of personal space. The machine is uncanny “because it assumes our human vitality and because we take on its deathly facticity” and Mailer’s soldiers cease to “think of themselves as individual men” becoming “merely envelopes.”[17][18]

The ability of mechanization to penetrate not just industry but impinge “upon the very center of the human psyche” has significant implications for the human experience of warfare.[20] General Cummings is so estranged from the human that he lacks recognizable expressions and merely displays “a certain vacancy in his face.”[21] When this inhuman commander attempts to smile, the only result is that his face looks “numb.” Yet this vacant cipher commands his troops with an absolute power they have little choice but to obey. Ordered out on patrol and lit up by the light of a flare, the soldiers become a mass of “black cutouts moving past a spotlight”, two-dimensional objects obeying orders “with no consciousness any longer of what they were doing.”[22] Even in extreme situations they are unable to react as humans. When a Japanese soldier is caught in a rain of bullets, he remains standing with “no expression on his face; he looked vacant and surprised even as the bullets struck him in the chest.”[23] Even the bodies of the dead are inhuman, with one swollen corpse resembling “a doll whose stuffing had broken forth.”[24]

Mailer’s insistence on unreality is a thematic preoccupation shared by uncanny texts, which Susan Bernstein points out frequently depict lapses of consciousness registered as experiences of dislocation and loss of control.[25]

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Mailer’s soldiers know “very little about what was happening in the campaign” and the days repeat themselves without incident until they are “no longer able to distinguish between things which had happened a few days before.”[26] This estrangement is compounded by their lack of agency within the military structure’s repetitiveness. The soldiers “stand guard at night, awaken a half hour after dawn, eat breakfast, wash their mess kits, shave, and load onto trucks” which transport them to their duties. They “return at noon, go out again after chow, and work until late afternoon when they would come back for supper, take a bath perhaps in the stream just outside the bivouac, and then go to sleep soon after dark.”[26] These minutely observed details of military life should intensify the fictional reality; instead, the obscurely felt doubts regarding the soldiers’ human identities complicates the suspension of disbelief necessary in the reading contract. When the platoon is sent out on reconnaissance, they march in a “leaden stupor . . . without any thought of where they went, dully, stupidly.” Any empathetic response to the plights of these men rendered mechanical by war imperatives is complicated by the description of the soldiers’ heavy packs becoming “part of their bodies.”[27] Although metaphorical, Mailer’s strategy provokes obscure doubts regarding the status of the soldiers as “real” people, fictional ciphers or uncanny machines, and destabilizes reader response to a text that appears to be realist but which is also oddly unreal.

Mailer’s army transforms human will, autonomy and labor into a series of estrangements experienced by dehumanized cogs and the strangeness of this fictional process is intensified by the process of fiction, which necessarily attempts to transform language into constructs perceived as human. The writer’s power “to alter reality in other people’s minds by the way we use words” remained an enigma for Mailer, who noted that “[d]ealing with words is a mysterious matter. It’s very insubstantial because they’re just little pieces of dark curly pigment on a white page.”[28] This “mysterious matter” sees Mailer’s text constantly veering between moments of verisimilitude and self-reflexivity, and is the reason for the novel’s strange preoccupation with what Freud terms “the omnipotence of thoughts.”[29] The ability to alter reality through language is even identified by Mailer as the mystery “that drove Hemingway insane.”[28] The soldiers’ fears regarding the omnipotence of thoughts is clearly connected with Mailer’s conscious theme of the loss of individuality,

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but is also linked to Mailer’s unconscious fears regarding his power as a writer and the threat posed to him by writing itself. Mailer explains how “a book takes on its own life in the writing” and suggests that the writer has “a certain responsibility” to a book which becomes like “a creature to you after a while.”[30] The writer feels “a bit like a master who’s got a fine animal” and Mailer admits to often feeling “a certain shame with what I’ve done with a novel.” If Mailer feels guilty about his failure towards something raised by him “like a child” then what kind of revenge might this ill-treated novel wreak on its author?[30]

In his numerous interviews, Mailer returns time and time again to Hemingway, who represents not just a great writer but one undone by the perils of writing. The mystery identified as driving Hemingway mad poses a similar threat for Mailer, who describes craft—as opposed to “the natural mystique of the novel”—as a bulwark against “the terror of confronting a reality which might open into more and more anxiety and so present a deeper and deeper view of the abyss.”[31] Reliance on craft is something Mailer attributes to mediocre writers yet he admits that “there was a time when I wanted very much to belong to the literary world. I wanted to be respected the way someone like Katherine Ann Porter used to be . . . As a master of the craft.”[32] Mailer’s fears about writing are thus twofold: on the one hand, he fears the mystery which he believes rendered Hemingway insane; on the other hand, he fears not belonging to the literary world of the masters of craft to whom writing poses a threat.

This discomfort with the powers of narrative plays out through the soldiers’ superstitious fears regarding death. When Gallagher flippantly comments, “You’re only gonna get your fuggin head blown off tomorrow,” he is suddenly seized with “a cold shuddering anxiety as though he had blasphemed.” As he hurriedly recites the Hail Mary, he has a vision of himself “lying on the beach with a bloody nub where his head should have been.”[33] Similarly, when Martinez cannot stop repeating the phrase “‘I don’t care if I do die, do die,’” he is overwhelmed with certainty that “something terrible” is about to happen. [34] The awful “something” that constantly threatens the soldiers is annihilation by war and by language. Croft is convinced with “passionate certainty” that Hennessey will die that very day; when this does indeed occur, Croft becomes privy to “vistas of such omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it directly.”[35] Red also

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  1. ↑ Boyer 1985, p. 246.
  2. ↑ Mailer 1948, p. 639.
  3. ↑ Cixous 1976, p. 528.
  4. ↑ Brians 1987, p. 17.
  5. ↑ Norris 2000, p. 184.
  6. ↑ Filreis 2007.
  7. ↑ Mailer, p. 23.
  8. ↑ Mailer, p. 25.
  9. ↑ Mailer, p. 45.
  10. ↑ Mailer 1964, p. 13.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Dempsey 1948, p. 6.
  12. ↑ Mailer 1964, p. 15.
  13. ↑ Mailer, p. 142.
  14. ↑ Jones 1976, p. 97.
  15. ↑ Mailer, pp. 199-200.
  16. ↑ Jentsch 1995, p. 11.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Foster 1991, p. 51.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Mailer 1948, p. 568.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Mailer 1948, p. 569.
  20. ↑ Giedion 1948, p. 41.
  21. ↑ Mailer 1948, p. 81.
  22. ↑ Mailer 1948, pp. 129, 131.
  23. ↑ Mailer 1948, p. 153.
  24. ↑ Mailer 1948, p. 211.
  25. ↑ Bernstein 2003, p. 1125.
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Mailer 1948, p. 252.
  27. ↑ Mailer 1948, pp. 505-6.
  28. ↑ 28.0 28.1 Mailer, p. 161.
  29. ↑ Freud 1976, p. 633.
  30. ↑ 30.0 30.1 Mailer 1964, p. 26.
  31. ↑ Mailer 1964, p. 30.
  32. ↑ Mailer 1964, p. 29.
  33. ↑ Mailer 1948, p. 7.
  34. ↑ Mailer 1948, p. 21.
  35. ↑ Mailer 1948, pp. 29, 40.


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