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The Naked, the Dead, and the Machine: A New Look at Norman Mailer's First Novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
In spite of the marked degree to which twentieth-century art and literature have reflected the influence of mechanization on modern experience, the dominant tone of American literary treatments of the machine remains one of tension. Particularly apparent in the novel, this tension functions as a central conflict in books by Norris, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, and others. It is most evident in novels about World War II, when mechanization, industrialism, and statism reached their violent zenith, and is nowhere better illustrated than in Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. A structural pattern that reveals the army as the epitome of the machine in a society that is universally mechanistic, a symbolically pivotal clash between the natural organic world and the invading machine, and imagery and style drawn from the substance and language of the machine world, all combine to form a total metaphoric environment in which the central characters personify and articulate the opposing values of the machine-oriented “system” and the will to individual integrity. Thus the function of the machine as a controlling metaphor in American World War II novels is underlined and clarified by the informing centrality of that metaphor in the first really significant, probably the best, and certainly the most imitated of those novels.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1972
References
1 “Modern Art and Its Philosophy,” in Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (London: Kegan Paul, 1936), pp. 82, 97. The productions of the cubists, the glass, metal, and wire creations of the early constructivists, the machine-like horse of Duchamp-Villon, Brancusi's gleaming bird—which Lewis Mumford likens to the shell of a torpedo—and the work of present-day constructivists, who actually work with steel girders and piston rods, cutting and welding their truly machine-like creations, all stand as ample evidence of Hulme's foresight.
2 Peter Viereck, “The Muse and the Machine,” Etudes Anglaises, 20 (1967), 227.
3 “Modern Poetry,” in The Collected Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Waldo Frank (New York: Liveright, 1933), p. 177.
4 The Rediscovery of America: An Introduction to a Philosophy of American Life (New York: Scribners, 1929), pp. 41–42.
5 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York : Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), p. 349. Marx gives this term to Henry Adams' vision at the turn of the century of the conflict between threatening industrial society and human vitality.
6 Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, 1934), p. 86.
7 World War I and the American Novel (Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), p. 214.
8 The Mortal No: Death and the Modern Imagination (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964), p. 226. Mr. Hoffman writes extensively on the predicament of man in relation to the peculiar values of and in mechanized war. Especially relevant to the present study are chapters on “The Assailant and the Victim” and “Terror's Unique Enigma: The Literature of World War ii.”
9 “Rugged Times” (an interview), The New Yorker, 23 Oct. 1948, p. 25.
10 See John W. Aldridge, After the Lost Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), pp. 135–36, and Chester E. Eisenger, Fiction of the Forties (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 33–38.
11 See Daniel Spicehandler, “The American War Novel,” Diss. Columbia 1960, pp. 200–03.
12 See Walter B. Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956), p. 272, and Joseph Waldmeir, “Ideological Aspects of the American Novels of World War ii,” Diss. Michigan State 1959, pp. 105–12.
13 For an interesting commentary on the thematic ambiguity in the novel, see Norman Podhoretz, “Norman Mailer: The Embattled Vision,” Partisan Review, 26 (Summer 1959), 374–76.
14 This and all subsequent references to The Naked and the Dead are to the Rinehart edition (New York and Toronto, 1948).
15 Note here that Mailer, likening his scene to an abstract painting, is using the same angular lines, hard, clean light, and “forms associated in our minds with the idea of machinery” that Hulme predicted were to be the distinguishing features of modern art.
16 These abnormal sexual responses of Cummings and Croft are an index to an important concern of the novel : the frustration or perversion of love in mechanized society. Along with other themes already discussed, this concern has its metaphor in the machine's violent attempt on the natural purity of the island.