An executioner`s song

1.2 Naturalistic Normal Mailer's life and his works impact on American Literature.

Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, activist, film-maker and actor. Mailer was born to a Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey on January 31, 1923. His father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, popularly known as "Barney", was an accountant born in South Africa, and his mother, Fanny (née Schneider), ran a housekeeping and nursing agency. Mailer's sister, Barbara, was born in 1927. In a career spanning over six decades, Mailer had 11 best-selling books, at least one in each of the seven decades after World War II—more than any other post-war American writer.

His novel An executioner`s song was published in 1948 and brought him early and wide renown. His 1968 nonfiction novel Armies of the Night won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction as well as the National Book Award. His best-known work is widely considered to be The Executioner's Song, the 1979 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Mailer is considered an innovator of "creative non-fiction" or "New Journalism", along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe, a genre which uses the style and devices of literary fiction in fact-based journalism. He was a cultural commentator and critic, expressing his views through his novels, journalism, frequent media appearances, and essays, the most famous and reprinted of which is "The White Negro".

In 1955, he and three others founded The Village Voice, an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village. In 1960, he was convicted of assault and served a three-year probation after he stabbed his wifeAdele Morales with a penknife, nearly killing her. In 1969, he ran an unsuccessful campaign to become the mayor of New York. Mailer was married six times and had nine children.

An executioner`s song

Mailer advanced with astonishing rapidity from his first attempts at fiction, to his own war experience, to the writing of An executioner`s song. Although it is a very long novel, its coverage of so many diverse elements in remarkably fluid prose and in a compact four-part structure conveys a sense of a single complex concert of human motives and the vagaries of existence. An executioner`s songis far more than a war novel, more than a political novel, for it examines the way human experience is shaped and interpreted, and it establishes the ground out of which human character and belief arise.

Part 1, “Wave,” concerns preparations for the invasion of Anopopei, an island held by the Japanese. The first wave of troops will assault the beaches by riding through the surf and charging ashore. One wave against another, humanity against the nature of its own enterprise, is one of the dominant themes of the novel, as its second paragraph indicates by describing an anonymous soldier who “lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide-awake. All about him, like the soughing of surf, he hears the murmurs of men dozing fitfully.” The poker game the soldiers play, like the war itself, has its meaning in “the margin of chance,” in the calculation and skill that is nevertheless vulnerable to luck, good or bad. Much of what makes the novel fascinating is its persistent aligning of the interface between planning and probability; each soldier tries to gauge what his chances are of surviving, or—in Sergeant Croft’s and General Cummings’s cases—dominating the war, although almost every man, like Martinez, has at least one moment of fear, of total vulnerability, when he feels “naked” and almost certainly dead under fire.

Part 2, “Argil and Mold,” shifts from the reactions of the combat soldiers to war to the grand strategy of General Cummings, who plans on shaping his army to fit his master design. For Cummings, the war—like history itself—must have a pattern, one that he can follow and channel in his direction. He disclaims the operations of chance; seeming accidents, he contends, are actually a result of a person’s failure to capitalize on the opportunities life affords. If Cummings does not yet know the precise trajectory of history, he is confident that he will be percipient enough to discover it eventually. His game is not cards; it is chess. “The trick is to make yourself an instrument ofyour own policy,” Cummings advises his resistant subordinate, Lieutenant Hearn, who refuses to credit the General’s command not only over the forces of history but also over Hearn himself.

In the course of his conflict with Hearn, Cummings reveals his disdain for the liberal’s “exaggerated idea of the rights due” to persons as individuals. In the General’s reading of history, it is not the development of individuality but of power concentrations that counts in evaluating the causes of the war. As a result, he violates the integrity of much of the experience that is portrayed in the novel, for each character— including the General—is given a unique biography, a singularity of purpose that defies the notion that individuals can be permanently fashioned as part of a power bloc. After the initial success of his landing on Anopopei, Cummings is thwarted: “The campaign had gone sour…. [H]is tactics were as well conceived as they had ever been, his staff performances as thorough, his patrols as carefully planned, but nothing happened….A deep unshakable lethargy settled over the front-line troops.” Like Hearn, Cummings finds he cannot argue his army into action for an indefinite period of time.

Each of the principal characters in the novel behaves not only in terms of his background (the “Time Machine” sections delineate prewar experiences) and his participation in a platoon (the “Chorus” sections suggest the extent to which individual experience can be collectivized), but also in terms of the power argument between Cummings and Hearn. That is why it is almost inevitable that Hearn will ultimately be placed at the head of Sergeant Croft’s platoon, for Croft has often kept his men together by the force of his own will, by an invincible belief in the rightness of his position that is virtually identical to Cummings’s self-assurance.

Like Cummings, Croft contends with a geographical and ethnic cross section of soldiers: Red Valsen, “the wandering minstrel” from Montana, who distrusts all permanent relationships; Gallagher, “the revolutionary reversed,” an Irish Catholic from Boston who seems perpetually angry at the way the more privileged or the more conniving have deprived people of their dignity but who is also profoundly prejudiced against other groups, especially the Jews; Julio Martinez, the Mexican American, who desperately asserts his loyalty, his integrity, by taking pride in courageously executing Croft’s dangerous orders; Joey Goldstein, who from his “cove in Brooklyn” tries to ingratiate himself in a world inhospitable to Jews; and Wilson, the affable southerner who traffics easily with women and the world, and who is without much sense of life’s disparities and of how he has hurt as well as charmed others with his “fun.” These characters and others are meant to convey the multiplicity of experience that Croft crushes in disciplining his platoon.

In one of the most telling scenes in the novel, Croft allows a captured Japanese soldier time to recover his composure, to express his humanity, to plead for his life, and to sense that he is in the presence of other compassionate human beings, before brutally shooting him in the very moment of his happiness. Croft’s cruelty is the most extreme extension of Cummings’s declaration that individuals do not count, that single lives are valued too highly. Ultimately, this kind of merciless wiping out of opposition does not make Croft a better soldier; his attempt to scale Mount Anaka has been futile from the beginning, and the Japanese are defeated without the imposition of either Croft’s or Cummings’s will. Just as Croft’s men accidently blunder into the hornets that drive them back down the mountain, so in part 3, Major Dalleson, a mediocre, timid officer, blunders into easy and rapid victory over the Japanese while Cummings is away from the campaign seeking naval support for an elaborate plan that in the end proves superfluous in the defeat of a Japanese army almost disintegrating by itself for lack of food and military supplies.

Part 3, “Plant and Phantom,” prepares for the novel’s abrupt denouement by exploring Friedrich Nietzsche’s troubling premise that “even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom. But do I bid you become phantoms or plants?” The question of human nature is unanswerable; human beings are divided creatures, both body and mind, and neither side of that nature can entirely suppress the other even in the shrewdest of individuals. In the novel, people live and die as plants and phantoms, as thinking and feeling beings who are bound by the conditions of nature and by the consequences of their own actions, over which they often have surprisingly little control. People are truncated, their lives are suddenly cut off, even as their thoughts appear to extend their hold over events. Thus, Hearn drives his men to the other side of the island, so that they can reconnoiter the possibility of an invasion behind Japanese battle lines. He suffers from weariness, from the men’s resistance, from his own self-doubt, but he reasserts himself:

SUMMARY
American literature is the written or literature produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. During its early history, America was a series of British colonies on the eastern coast of the present-day United States. Therefore, its literary tradition begins as linked to the broader tradition of English literature. However, unique American characteristics and the breadth of its production usually now cause it to be considered a separate path and tradition.

British literature refers to literature associated with the United Kingdom, Isle of Man and Channel Islands. This includes literatures from England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. By far the largest part of British literature has been written in the English language, with English literature developing into a global phenomenon, because of its use in the former colonies of Britain. In addition the story of British literature involves writings in Anglo-Norman, Anglo-Saxon, Cornish, Guernésiais, Jèrriais, Latin, Manx, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and other languages. Literature in Northern Ireland includes writings in English, Irish and Ulster Scots. Irish writers have played an important part in the development of literature in England and Scotland, but though the whole of Ireland was politically part of the United Kingdom between January 1801 and December 1922, it is controversial to describe Irish literature as British. For some this includes works by authors from Northern Ireland. Also, because of the creation of the Republic of Ireland, the term the Isles is used instead of the British Isles.

The main reason to choose this course paper is I am very interested in American and English literature as well as Kyrgyz literature. The most important aim of my course paper was to compare American and Kyrgyz novels. So I compare the American novel «An American tragedy» by Theodor Dreiser with Kyrgyz novel «The first teacher» by Chyngyz Aitmatov. Both of this books were written in 20th century and give us important informations about people’s life in that time.

Learning peculiarity of these novels I realized that in 20th century America was more developed country than Kyrgyzstan. More people were educated there and lived in a good lifestyle.With Alvin Belknap’s character author shows how American people were educated and worked under the law.In contrast more Kyrgyz people were not educated. In Chyngyz Aitmatov’s novel there explained their attitude to education. With Duishen’s character the author shows how education is important for mankind.

While writing this course paper I get many useful informations for me. It helps me to learn English language widely. After know these informations I started to read foreign literary books more. Because it helps me to know more information about another peoples life, culture and traditions. In the end I would like to advise all students who are learning English language to read more literary books.