The Naked and the Dead

The Naked and the Dead

By Norman Mailer

With an Introduction by John Pilger

Flamingo 1993. 717 pp., $19.95 (pb) Reviewed by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/5034

In 1948, Norman Mailer published one of the best novels to come out of World War II. This 1993 reissue of The Naked and the Dead reminds us of the brilliance of Mailer's talent.

Mailer's artistic skill heightens the intense authenticity of the novel's portrayal of war, which is given added depth because, as John Pilger says in his introduction, the novel is written from "Mailer's solidarity with the ordinary, universal soldier".

A reconnaissance platoon of US soldiers engaged in the campaign against the Japanese-held islands in the Pacific confront the unpleasantness of damp feet, soaking uniforms, accumulated body odours, diarrhoea, painful fungus sores, sleeplessness and all the other mundane trials of soldiering, alleviated only by the panic of combat. The terror, exhaustion, boredom and fear, the manic fury of fighting, the bitterness and resentment at army discipline were all part of Mailer's experience as a soldier during the war, and he recreates them with superb power.

What lifts the novel above its already high level as a naturalist portrayal of war is Mailer's treatment of the political nature of the army and the capitalist society from which it springs.

At the top of the power pole is the right-wing General Cummings, with his distasteful but accurate understanding that the army rests on men being "frightened of the man above you and contemptuous of your subordinates". This "fear ladder", the obedience to authority which prevents the injustice of capitalist institutions from provoking revolt, underpins the hierarchy of army, school and workplace alike.

In the middle of the ladder are the foremen of the military, the non-commissioned officers. Sergeant Croft, in civilian life a member of the National Guard who killed a striking oil worker, has "ice instead of blood" in his veins, is a disciplinarian, hated yet feared. Lieutenant Hearn, however, suffers the pangs of liberal conscience, bothered by the ordinary soldier who "sleeps with mud and insects and worms while the officers bitch because there are no paper napkins". Hearn has dabbled in Marx and Lenin at Harvard, worked a spell as a union organiser, thought during the Depression of joining "the Party". On the island of Anopopei, he crosses the general, gets assigned to the reconnaissance platoon where his egalitarianism towards the men earns the ire of Croft, who sets him up to stop a Japanese bullet in his chest.

Yet Hearn, for Mailer, is the inconsistent "bourgeois liberal". Hearn wavers between his ambition for the top of the ladder, with its material and power rewards, and his sympathy with the ordinary soldier at the bottom. He is at heart "just another Croft", he thinks, yet he tries to make common cause with the common soldier because he doesn't like what being a Croft does to people.

If middle-class liberals like Hearn offer no solution, then neither, for Mailer, does the working class. Private Valsen is the symbolic proletariat. He was down the Montana coal mines at age 14 for "ten hours a day, six days a week". Valsen demonstrates the most potential of all the platoon for standing up to Croft. Yet, in the end, he comes to see that "he was licked" by authority. With his failure, and Hearn's death, and with Croft in control, the novel ends in a "vast hopelessness" with the soldiers "still on the treadmill".

This ending reflects Mailer's perception of the fading of the dream of prewar social revolution and the hopes of millions that the war against fascism also meant an end to their daily servitude in the capitalist democracies. Nevertheless, Mailer's left leanings and his artist's sensitivity combine to present the army as a powerful metaphor of the rottenness of capitalism.

With no clear vision of an alternative social order, Hearn and Valsen are reduced to apathy, cynicism and despair. They are not fooled by the possibility of change within the system, but they see no way of scrapping the system itself. Yet even war has brought to ripeness the self-confidence and aspirations for change of many oppressed people. As Lieutenant Hearn recognises, the soldier with a rifle is only a half-turn from using it against the class enemy at home.