570 The American Century: Literature since 1945Mailer wrote his own war novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), he said, as
“a parable about the movement of man through history.” His book, he explained,
explored “the outrageous proposition of cause and effect ... in a sick society.”
It found “man corrupted, confused to the point of helplessness,” but it also found
that “there are limits beyond which he cannot be pushed.” And it showed that
“even in this corruption and sickness” man had “yearnings for a better world.” The
parable is executed remorselessly in terms of flesh and blood, depicting the capture
of the island of Anopopei from the Japanese. There are two levels to the action.
There is the actual fighting of the reconnaissance platoon under Sergeant Croft,
which gives us the view on the ground of the combatant soldier. And there is the
strategic view of the operation as conceived by General Cummings. Connecting
these two levels is the middle-class liberal, Lieutenant Hearn, who will not agree
with Cummings’s fascist beliefs, is humiliated by him and is eventually killed by the
agency of Croft. There is a bleak irony at work throughout the narrative; we are in
the realm of the absurd. The island is captured. But that is not thanks to the strategy
of Cummings but to the actions of the incompetent Major Dalleson. The capture of
the island serves no useful purpose. And what prevails in the end is the desperate
obstinacy of oppressed men, who reach the point where they can be oppressed no
further. The ultimate irony is the way in which the members of the platoon turn.
Pushed by Croft almost to the top of Mount Anaka, they stumble into a nest of
hornets, from which they flee in terror down the mountainside. Discarding their
weapons as they go, they suddenly understand that “if they threw away enough
possessions, they would not be able to continue the patrol.”
The eight men of the reconnaissance platoon are clearly meant to be a representative
cross-section of American society. They are drawn from different places and ethnic
groups. Their backgrounds and prewar lives, however, represented in interchapters
that Mailer calls “The Time-Machine,” have a grim similarity about them. These are
the wretched of the earth, conceived in terms that recall the fiction of Dos Passos.
The energy of the book does not lie here, really, but in the portraits of the two men
of power. Croft is the natural fascist, a sadist who kills for the thrill of killing.
Cummings, in turn, is the intellectual fascist who not only enacts but expresses his
beliefs. “The only morality of the future,” he tells Hearn, “is a power morality, and a
man who cannot find his adjustment to it is doomed.” “There is one thing about
power,” Cummings adds. “It can flow only from the top down.” So, with its rigid
hierarchies and distinctions, “you can consider the Army as a preview of the future.”
That remark made by Cummings was seminal for Mailer, since much of his work –
extraordinary in its range and volume as it is – can be seen as an exploration of
power: its different manifestations and modes of operation, how it expresses itself in
men, women, and society. His second novel, Barbary Shore (1951), set mostly in a
run-down boarding house in Brooklyn, is about power and politics. His third novel,
The Deer Park (1955), set around Hollywood, is more about power and sex. A later
book, Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), is about precisely those national fantasies of
power that prompted America into its imperialist venture in Southeast Asia.
Narrated by a character called D.J., who claims to work for a Texas radio station,GGray_c05.indd 570ray_c 05 .indd 570 8 8/1/2011 7:31:32 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 32 PM